Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

by Katherine May

But I’m also being forcibly reminded that this is some kind of a gateway into a new phase in my life. I had been wound so tight with stress that I could no longer see past my own knots, and now, having relaxed ever so slightly, I’m feeling the full force of its impact. I’m run-down. I have skittered over to Iceland in the wake of a bomb blast, and now the aftershock has caught up with me. Life is clearly teaching me some kind of lesson, but I can’t decipher it yet.

We hope that we, the living, will not lose the meanings that seem to evaporate when our loved ones die.

But then, that’s what grief is—a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything. I felt it most keenly for the first year, but it has never gone away. There are just some things that I would say now that I didn’t think to say when I was seventeen. There are just some things I know now that I did not know back then.

Try as I might, I can’t produce the adult hardness towards a snowfall, full of resentment at the inconvenience. I love the inconvenience the same way that I sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside your normal habits.