Wintering Quotes

“The very permanence of the label - of having a brain that just happened to work in a certain way- was my salvation. I had to adapt. I had to surrender. The only thing breaking me was pretending to be like everyone else.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Nobody, had ever said to me, 'You need to live a life that you can cope with, not the one that other people want. Start saying no. Just do one thing a day. No more than two social events in a week.' I owe my life to him.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This isn't about you getting fixed," he said. "This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But it was there, too, that I came to a kind of acceptance: of my own limitations and of the future that lay before me. I learned that I was not invincible at this moment in my life, but also that it wouldn't last forever. I learned to rest and to surrender.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Here is another truth about wintering: you'll find wisdom in your winter, and once it's over, it's your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it's our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Happiness is the greatest skill we'll ever learn. It is not a part of ourselves that should be hived off into a dark corner, the shameful territory of the willfully naïve.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I am a profoundly rational being, prone to asking questions. I cannot accept vagueness. I require a systematic understanding of any beliefs that I might hold. I need them to make coherent sense.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“It makes me realize that I have been avoiding all society, skulking at home in a kind of shame. I am staying away from others because I don't know what the New Year will bring, and I'm afraid and don't have the grace to conceal it.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“They say that we should dance like no one is watching. I think that applies to reading, too.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is asking me to be more careful with my energies and to rest a while until spring.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But then, that's what grief is - a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“That's what you learn in winter: there is a past, a present, and a future. There is a time after the aftermath.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I'm feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can't imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I realize suddenly how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a liberty of paranoia.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“That I'm noticing these things only now that I'm physically unable to remedy them feels like the kind of exquisite torture devised by vengeful Greek gods.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“What can you do when you're already doing everything?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency, and vanishing from sight; but that's where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I began to get a feel for my winterings: their length and breadth, their heft. I knew that they didn't last forever. I knew that I had to find the most comfortable way to live through them until spring.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, side-lined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Singing with others is a kind of alchemy, an act of expansive magic in which you lose yourself and become part of a whole.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The sea was like a shortcut to intimacy, and while riding our cold-water highs, we found ourselves blurting out all the troubles of our current lives. We swam alongside one another's anxieties about money, our parents, our children. We dispense with social niceties and started talking as soon as we hit the water. We let the cold unburden us of our own personal winters, just for a few moments, and freely shared our darkest, most vulnerable thoughts. We talked, barely knowing one another's names, and then wriggled back into our everyday clothes and walked away to our everyday lives, shivering a little, feeling that sparkle in our veins. The brevity of our swims was an ideal window in which to loosen our tongues and then tighten them again. We buttoned ourselves back up and went home.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I still retain a little of that attitude towards the snow. 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. I love the visual transformation it brings about, that recolouring of the world into sparkling white, the way that the rules change so that everybody says hello as they pass. I love what it does to the light, the purplish clouds that loom before it descends, and the way it announces itself from behind your curtains in the morning, glowing a diffuse whiteness that can only mean snow. Heading out in a snowstorm to catch the flakes on my gloves, I love the feeling of it fresh underfoot. I am rarely childlike and playful except in snow.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Wherever we want to denote the hunger of the cold season, we turn to wolves. They are the enemy we love to hate, the feral intelligence we most fear. Their morality is mutable. They do what they have to do. In the wolf, we are offered a mirror of ourselves as we might be, without the comforts and constraints of civilisation.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“How is it that we can code so carefully the weight of loss, grief, time, and continuity into our children's books, but forget them so thoroughly ourselves?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But I know, too, that I have spent most of my life trying to push winter away, having rarely had to truly feel its bite...I'm certain that the cold has healing powers that I don't yet come close to understanding. After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In the changing room later, I experience a different kind of warmth---the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren't the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond all joy to be bikini-ready and tanned as an act of disguise. These are northern bodies, slack-bottomed and dimpling, with unruly pubic hair and the scars of cesareaen sections, chattering companionably in a language I don't understand. They are a glimpse of life yet to come: a message of survival, passed on through the generations. It's a message I rarely find in my buttoned-up home country, and I think about the times I've suffered silent furies at the treacheries of my own body, imagining them to be unique. We don't know ourselves in context. But there is evidence of wintering here, freely shared like an exchange of precious gifts.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times