It’s June, and officially summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer is a big deal in my country, which spends most of the year shivering in the cold, abandoned by the sun — wintering.
The English word wintering has various meanings. It can mean spending the winter season in a particular place, often somewhere warmer or better suited to winter conditions. For example, bears hibernate during the coldest months, while some arctic birds winter by flying to milder climates. This is the context in which the Finnish equivalent of wintering is used.
Wintering can also be understood metaphorically — the need (and benefit) for withdrawal and contemplation during difficult times. Katherine May’s bestseller Wintering is a meditation on the healing power of stillness and surrender to life’s experiences, over which we have as little control as we do over the seasons.
May also writes about Finns and marvels at how we endure the kind of extreme cold and kaamos (polar night) she’s never experienced.
And yes, in winter we retreat indoors, sit by candlelight, and either enjoy the chance to be antisocial with a solid excuse, or sink into depression and start counting the days until spring (like me).
I’m the kind of Finn who’d be happy to admire snowy scenery in a picture or film while sitting on a beach somewhere in Southern Europe. I’d rather not take part in the winter “fun” — skiing, skating, and all that — which many of my friends genuinely enjoy. My aversion to winter makes me a “bad Finn,” because loving winter is considered as patriotic here as loving ice hockey. The fact that my father — a demonstrably patriotic war veteran — also couldn’t stand the cold months is never taken into account by my winter-loving friends (though, yes, he did love ice hockey...), who think I’m just a wimp.
I’m a summer person. And before someone says, “there’s no such thing,” I say: yes, there is! It’s a science-backed fact that, just as some of us are morning people and others are night owls, some thrive in winter while others simply can’t endure it.
May’s book is lovely, and the wintering metaphor resonates with me, too. But right now, on this second day of June, I’m thinking about summer — and about the words summering and summerize, which I just stumbled upon while Googling.
Nightless Nights
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we Finns don’t have words like summering or summerize — though I do find that slightly surprising, given how extreme the contrast between winter and summer is here.
A Colombian acquaintance of mine, married to a Finn, once told me that the most baffling thing about Finland is how completely different people are in winter and summer. “They’re not even the same people!” she said.
And she’s right. There’s a logical explanation: Winter Finland and Summer Finland are different countries — so it’s only natural that their inhabitants are different, too.
We don’t have exact words for summering or summerizing, but we do them anyway. When winter is finally over, we crawl out of our caves, pale as potato sprouts, as disoriented as the whole of creation by the sudden turning on of the lights, blinking our eyes in disbelief that winter is, indeed, finally over.
Suddenly — and I do mean literally suddenly — the sun appears again, after months of hiding. It’s there, all the time. There’s no “night” in the usual sense. Just nightless nights. Midnight sun.
No wonder this drastic exposure to light makes everyone a little crazy. Birds sing like there’s no tomorrow. Seeds germinate, sprouts push through the earth that was frozen solid just days ago. Everything blooms, everywhere, in every imaginable colour. Everything is bursting with all shades of green. There’s so much muchness all at once that you don’t know what to do with it. And as much as I’ve longed for this explosion of life, I have to admit: it sometimes makes me anxious. It’s just too much, too fast, too green.
In early summer, Finns go into a kind of summer shock. Their pineal glands start buzzing. They get out of control.
They can’t sleep. They’re restless. They start obsessively cleaning their terraces and porches. They scrub their garden furniture. They fix their bikes. They buy buckets of sunscreen. They rush to garden centres, buying plants — lots of them, in all kinds, colours, shapes, and sizes. If they have gardens, they plant things: flowers, perennials, herbs — whatever grows. And they barbecue like Australians at Christmas! Mostly sausages, but sometimes they get adventurous and grill mushrooms, corn, chicken fillets, or whatever’s trendy that summer (there’s always something trending).
Finns summerize. They prepare for the three months of summer — and the fun they’ll eventually pay for with eight months of cold.
They drink beer. And coffee. There’s nothing like having breakfast or an afternoon beer outdoors in the sunshine. There’s nothing like sunshine. Every spring — and even after 66 of them — I still get teary-eyed every time I feel the sun’s warmth on my skin.
The Heart of Summer
If winter in the North is for wintering — for contemplation, withdrawal, and tending to broken hearts — then summering is wild. Uh oh, those summer nights, as Sandy and Danny sing in Grease. I always thought most babies here must be conceived in summer (I was born at the end of March and my brothers in May), but no — Finns make babies mostly in winter. I suppose while we do winter, we don’t do it quite as strictly as other nations.
So what is summering?
It’s a tricky question.
While wintering, according to May, is about honouring seasonal change and surrendering calmly and lovingly to life’s cycles — the alternation between life and death — summering is different. But how?
In summer, we’re more active and social and even wild, but also more aware of impermanence. Finns know that summer is brief. It will be over too soon — and too suddenly. Winter always seems to drag on forever, especially January, the longest month of the year.
But summer is like childhood — over in a blink. And knowing this makes it all the more precious. You cling to it so desperately that you may end up unable to enjoy it fully — or at all.
You might even get summer anxiety. The Finnish writer Sinikka Nopola created a character called Likka (“likka” means “chick” in vernacular Finnish), a young woman who does not know how to deal with summer. She goes all FOMO with it. She sits on her balcony, watching others enjoy the Nordic summer — eating strawberries, wearing their summer clothes — painfully aware that she’ll never get to the “heart of summer” like everyone else. She fears she’ll always be an outsider, an observer, never a guest at the party.
And I can relate.
A Happy Kind of Sad
Once we get past the initial summer shock — usually by midsummer, which is a huge celebration here — we settle down. We get used to the warm weather. We swim in lakes and the sea. We eat strawberries. Lots of them. Then we head to the forest to pick blueberries and, while swatting mosquitoes and listening to the trees hum, we start noticing the changes. It’s still summer, but we see where it’s going.
Sometimes we become emotional. Even sad. I know I do. There’s nothing quite as melancholic as a quiet lake on a late summer evening. I don’t know if melancholic is the right word for the feeling that overtakes me when I watch nature, still breathtaking, but slowly moving past its peak, and surrender to what’s inevitable: to loss, to the realisation that we can’t ever hold on to what we love.
The birds fall silent. Wildflowers begin to wither. Dragonflies — messengers of summer’s end — start to appear.
It’s all very sad. Or maybe a happy kind of sad. It’s hard to explain. Many Finnish folk songs and poems reflect the emotion of this phase of summering.
We’re not there yet. We’re still summerizing. Still in the thick of it. But even now, I’m aware this wonder won’t last. The lilacs aren’t in full bloom yet, but I’m already mourning the moment they turn back into ordinary green bushes no one notices.
In the end, wintering and summering aren’t so different. Both carry a kind of sadness — the sadness of endings. In winter, surrendering to what is inevitable is easier — nature sleeps and doesn’t agitate us like summer does. In summer, there’s so much to cling to that it becomes harder to live in the moment and fully appreciate its beauty while making peace with its impermanence.
A Final Thought
I’ll close this post with a quote from my book Irresistible (which deals with resistance and the importance of surrender), because it captures the essence of summering:
As I write this, it’s the last day of July. I clearly remember how, at the beginning of June, I felt anxious about how quickly summer was passing. I wanted to cling to June’s pale evenings like a bat clings to an eave and just stay there. I wanted to forbid the lilacs from finishing their bloom and force the wagtails to continue their early-morning concerts. I was afraid summer would end — because I knew it eventually would.
And no wonder. I was raised by a father who believed summer ended at Midsummer and Christmas was over by Independence Day, December 6th.
But now that it’s late summer, I notice my anxiety has eased. I no longer have the energy to resist summer ending— and because of that, I can finally enjoy it.
Happy beginning of summer, all of you, and if you live in the North, remember: summer doesn’t last three months — it lasts one precious moment at a time.
🌱
The image: Mowing the lawn and even raking are not recommended in Finland any more. The insects need all kinds of plants, even weeds, and we need all the insects, and the hedgehogs need places to hide, so I let my lawn turn into a meadow and let it do its business. So liberating and stress-free, and fun to watch!
P.S. I just learned there’s now a Finnish word, “kesäily,” that means pretty much the same as summering or enjoying summer.
There is something precious about listening to the seasons, the flowers and bats, the sun and the strawberries while humans desecrate each other and the planet. Your peice gave me a bit of an escape, a reminder that I can look and deflect to a better place.
You didn't mention fish! Fresh caught, barbecued järven rannalla!