Mary (literary_bear)

“Danger, when it is always imminent, does harm. It doesn't need to actually arrive. You exhaust yourself in the act of forever looking over your shoulder. Your body readies itself to fight and never quite discharges that chemical cocktail. You channel it instead into anger and self-pity and anxiety and hopelessness. You divert it into work. But really what you do, with every fibre of your being, is watch. You are incessantly, exhaustingly alert. You don't dare ever let up, just in case the danger takes advantage of your inattention. I've forgotten what it feels like to have space in my brain for anything other than watching. For a long time I kept working teaching, pitching articles, writing editorial reports and for a while, that felt like a life raft. But then, incrementally, it became impossible. I was aware of a fog descending, a seizing of the gears, but it seemed diffuse until now.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“She would live out her days at Auchnasaugh, a bookish spinster attended by cats and parrots, until that time when she might become ethereal, pure spirit untainted by the woes of flesh, a phantom drifting with the winds. What fun she would have as a ghost. She could hardly wait.”
― Elspeth Barker, O Caledonia

“Every single thing I must do – any hint of a demand – grinds against me. I resent it all. I want to be left, quietly, alone. I don’t know what I do in that time should I ever achieve that perfect aloneness. I like to think I would read, but in truth I would probably sleep. I don’t have the attention for reading. I don’t have the attention for anything, really. My brain feels entirely separate from me. It is empty, but it also cannot take any more in. It seems that it’s a useless organ, endlessly refusing to notice what I want it to notice. It will not engage. It just glances off everything, like a pale beam.”
― Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age