Hibernation!

 For at least the past week, I've been thinking about hibernation. I've even done some research on it. You would think that I would sit right down at my laptop and write a post. Yet it would seem that I myself am in a near hibernation state. It is freezing cold outside, the ground is covered with deep snow, and my new hip isn't really ready to navigate across icy surfaces. So I've been sitting in my comfortable recliner and listening to enthralling books on my Kindle. Hibernating. This morning in Friends Meeting, though, someone talked about how we all have passions. This thought pulled me enough out of my comfortable restful leisure to remember that indeed I have passions. And one of my passions is understanding and learning from the natural world. Now that I've woken up from my temporary hibernating state, I'm ready to write about hibernation, a phenomenon of the natural world which also affects us humans.

Hibernation has been around a long time. It usually happens with a species when the food gets scarce in the winter, though there are other environmental factors for some creatures that spur hibernation. The result of seasonal changes is that a wide variety of animals, amphibians, insects and plants slow down their metabolisms and retire for months until conditions are more favorable to come back to life. Some fish even freeze during the coldest months and come alive at the spring thaw! Many mammals hibernate. We often hear about bears in hibernation. The mother black bear prepares by eating a lot, putting on extra weight and fat, and then going into a protected den to bear her young. It's a warm and nurturing place for the newborns, all that fat and fur helping to keep them nourished and warm until the outside temperature rises.

Unless you're living near the equator, seasonal fluctuations have always been a challenge for living things on earth. From the beginning of the first life, organisms have been forced to find creative ways to handle extreme cold and lack of food, or they die. Birds and some animals migrate to warmer places. Most others stay in their home territory, and many of these find ways to survive by storing food in the autumn in a deep hole or holes, and retiring below ground for most of the time. They may not truly hibernate, but they take a long pause with little activity until spring comes. Lemurs (fellow primates) in Madacascar  find a warm tree hole to bury themselves in for 7 months out of each year! And recently studies of Neanderthal bones in northern England show that these ancient humans also hibernated during the cold winter when food was scarce. That fact was what I was looking for! For it seems to me that even though we've altered our environment such that we have plenty of food and shelter all year round, there's a part of us that may need this primal pause in the deep winter.

Our ancestors long ago were much more attuned to the climate and seasons than we are now. When the days grew short as the sun shone fewer hours, activity was curtailed. Before electricity, a household went to bed soon after it got dark outside. Food from the summer months was preserved by drying or fermenting. Fire was of supreme importance, both to heat homes and to cook food. Fire also provided a community gathering focus outside the homes. The night sky was more familiar to these ancestors, and turning points like the solstices and equinoxes were filled with meaning. Especially the point on the celestial calendar when days began to get longer was cause for celebration and entreaty: the community prayed that spring would come again, and summer, that the natural order would continue.

Now in the 21st Century, humans in many parts of the planet can live with little awareness of seasonal changes. Yes, we do put on coats in the winter, and lighter clothes in the summer. But otherwise, our routines do not change much. Electricity has lit up the night so that we only have dark when we turn off the lights. Our schedules, if we have a job, are the same all year round. We appear at our workplace in the early mornings, leave in the late afternoon, drive home, fix supper, sit around the living room and watch TV. We also live with a work ethic. If we have down time, many of us feel as if we should be doing something productive, getting a job done, being successful. Lying around and resting, no matter what time of year, is a sign of laziness or lassitude. And the world has gotten complicated. The internet has brought the far corners closer. Especially during the pandemic, our interaction with other people has come more and more through technology. We sit at our computers or cell phones or tablets and connect to our favorite world view. 

Fortunately, I am retired so I don't have a job to go to every day. That makes me able to respond to seasons a little more naturally. But I do light up the night with electricity, and my refrigerator and freezer hold plenty of food to last me a long time. I live in a warm home and my needs are not hard to meet. There is no need for me to hibernate in order to survive a time of sparse food or killing cold. Yet I am beginning to suspect that humans actually do need a deliberate pause in the winter. It is not our bodies that need this, but our psyches and our souls. We are such go-getters, striving for success, for money, for dominance. Turning on the TV shows us exciting sports teams competing, political parties competing, crime programs focusing on the fight of good versus evil. It is hard to get out of the constant hyper-activity of the culture. And I think we suffer from that. I am thankful that a combination of the pandemic and hip surgery recovery has forced me to retire from so much activity, and even then it has taken me a long time to finally feel OK about not doing something all the time. What I am learning is that it is OK to stop, OK to just be, beneficial to me and the world to pause and let myself be balanced by silence and quiet. We all can hibernate when we need it, until we are replenished and ready to rouse ourselves again.