Wintering Quotes

“Unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savored. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shring from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but it's instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us something is going wrong. If we don't allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt....normal feelings become monstrous when they're denied.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But 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

“Over and again, we find that winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit. Yet still we refuse them. The work of the cold season is to learn to welcome them.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a quiet house in lamplight, a spin in the garden to see bright stars on a clear night, the roar of the wood-burning stove, and the accompanying smell of charred wood. It is warming the teapot and making cups of bitter cocoa; it is stews magicked from bones with dumplings floating like clouds. It is reading quietly and passing away the afternoon twilight watching movies. It is thick socks and the bundle of a cardigan.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Instead 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The right to sing is an absolute, regardless of how it sounds to the outside world. We sing because we must. We sing because it fills our lungs with nourishing air, and lets our hearts soar with the notes we let out.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Snow vanquishes the mundane. It brings the everyday to a grinding halt and delays our ability to address our dreary responsibilities. Snow opens up the reign of the children, high on their unexpected liberty, daredevil and impervious to the cold.
In this glistening white space, they feel the burgeoning of their own power.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“A snow day is a wild day, a spontaneous holiday when all the tables are turned. This one had a bit of the spirit of Halloween and a little of Christmas. It was wild and cosy at the same time; rebellious and heartwarming. Here was yet another liminal space, a crossing point between the mundane and the magical. Winter, it seems, is full of them: fleeting invitations to step out of the ordinary. Snow may be beautiful, but it is also a very adept con artist. It offers us a whole new world, but just as we buy into it, it's whisked away.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with our without our consent. We learn to look more kindly on other people's crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But winter is a time when death comes closest--when the cold feels as thought it might yet snatch us away, despite our modern comforts. We still perceive the presence of those we've lost in the silence of those long evenings and in the depths of darkness that they bring. This is the season of ghosts. Their pale forms are invisible in bright sunlight. Winter makes them clear again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Our contemporary Western celebrations forget the dead altogether, or at least remove them from any association with grief and loss. They offer no comfort to those who mourn. We are, after all, a society that has done all it can to erase death, to pursue youth to the bitter end, and to sideline the elderly and infirm. For most of us, the old tradition of laying out our own dead is long forgotten, and the idea that we might be intimate with death is now some kind of a gothic joke. Today's Halloween simply reflects what we secretly think—that death is a surrender to decay that makes us monsters.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Halloween is an overturning of the natural order, with a lineage in old traditions of reversing the roles, letting the poor become rulers, and bringing the rich low. There has long been a feverish link between monsters and mockery, and those without power have often been given license to play at the edges of civility in order to quell more dangerous lurches towards riot and rebellion.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Change was happening, and here was its cousin, mortality, not so much knocking on my door as kicking it down like some particularly brutal extrajudicial force.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“At moments like this, sleep feels like falling; you sink into luxurious blackness only to jolt awake again, staring around at the darkness as if you might divine something in the grainy night.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured 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 this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“It's also a moment when I have to walk away from old alliances, to let the strings of some friendships fall loose, if only for awhile.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I make gingerbread men with Burt and find myself taking excessive care over them as if they are reversed for voodoo dolls. I imagine each one of them as a small act of defiance against the life I’ve been living. It’s a kind of sympathetic magic to handle something so pointless with such reverence: I am tending to the dead, gently laying to rest a set of values for which I no longer have any use.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“They say 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

“It will not burst into life in the Spring.
It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We hebben eerder de gewoonte ons het leven als een rechte lijn voor te stellen, een lange tocht van geboorte tot dood waarin we onze krachten bundelen, alleen om ze weer in te leveren, terwijl we langzaam maar zeker onze jeugdige schoonheid verliezen. Dat is een grove onwaarheid. Het leven kronkelt als een pad door de bossen. We hebben tijden waarin we floreren en tijden waarin we bladeren verliezen, waardoor onze naakte botten worden blootgelegd. Op een gegeven moment gaan ze weer groeien.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, the historian A. Roger Ekirch asserts that before the Industrial Revolution, it was normal to divide the night into two periods of sleep: the “first sleep”, or “dead sleep”, lasting from the evening until the early hours of the morning; and the “second” or “morning” sleep, which took the slumber safely to daybreak. In between, there was an hour or more of wakefulness known as the “watch”, in which “Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Many others made love, prayed, and ... reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.” In the intimacy of the darkness, families and lovers could hold deep, rich, wandering conversations that had no place in the busy daytime.
This was a function of the times in which the night really was dark, when the poor would go to sleep early to save the price of candles, and even the rich would have the choice of struggling on with their occupation in limited light or surrendering to sleep. Outside the house, the streets were usually unlit, so the only navigable space was home.
This was so ordinary, and perhaps also so private moment in the day, that little was written about it. Ekirch picks up a range of passing references to the first and second sleeps in diaries, letters, and literature, but this ancient practice is nearly invisible to the contemporary eye.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Unlike those terrible thrashing summer nights when the room is always too close to allow that final descent into oblivion, the cool winter nights afford me deep sleep and long, magical dreams. When I wake in the night, the dark seems more profound and velvety that usual, almost infinite. Winter is a season that invites me to rest well and feel restored, when I am allowed to retreat and be quietly separate.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The starkness of winter can reveal colours we would otherwise miss. I once watched a fox cross a frosty field, her coat shining against the gloom. Walking in the bare winter woodland, I am surrounded by astonishing foxy reds: the deep burnish of bracken, it’s dry fronds twisted to lacework; the deep crimson leaves left on brambles; the last remaining berries on honeysuckle and orange clusters of rose hips. The iconic holly, it’s boughs so thoroughly raided each Christmas. There is the bright yellow of gorse on heathland, going on until spring comes, as well as stately evergreens and the tangle of green leaves that remain unnoticed on the ground. Life goes on abundantly in winter – changes made here will usher us into future glories.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Even as the leaves are falling, the buds of next year’s crop are already in place, waiting to erupt again in spring. Most trees produce their buds in high summer, and the autumn leaf fall reveals them, neat and expectant, protected from the cold by thick scales. We rarely notice them because we think we’re seeing the skeleton of the tree, a dead thing until the sun returns./
The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. It’s fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and providing a source of nourishment for hungry deer. It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But ghost stories show us a different concern, hidden under our bluster: we hope that the dead won’t forget us. We hope that we, the living, will not lose the meanings that seem to evaporate when our loved ones die.
My own grandmother died, quite unexpectedly, when I was seventeen. I realize that it sounds absurd to say that about somebody who blew out the candles on her eightieth birthday cake in a hospital bed, but it was my first encounter with death, and it was unexpected to me. In my own naïve way, I expected her to get better and come home.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“On the way back to shore, I sit on the deck and let the low golden light slant onto my face. This is northern sunbathing – soaking the only part of your body you dare expose to the elements in the most diffuse warmth imaginable and feeling renewed. I realize that I find calm in watching the restless patterns the wind makes on the slate-blue Atlantic, far more than I ever could in a tropical paradise that isn’t mine. What’s the point in migrating to a warmer country for a couple of weeks to push winter away? It’s just delaying the inevitable. I want to winter in the cold, embrace the changes it brings, acclimatize.
But I know, too, that I have spent most of my life trying to push winter away, having rarely had to truly feel it’s bite.”
― 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. 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.
Perhaps it results from an illness or life event such as bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporary falling between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.
Yet it’s also inevitable. 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 dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun, an endless, unvarying high season. But life‘s not like that.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times