Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

by Katherine May

We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves.

we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.