Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

by Katherine May

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else.

Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.

Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs.

This is a mirror of my own winter, or how it seems to me: everybody else is drowsing while I am wide awake and hounded by sharp fears.

But then, that’s what grief is—a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.

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.