Wintering Quotes

“Amid the transformation of winter—the unwelcome change—is an abundance of life.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In Halloween, we see echoes of the Gaelic pagan festival of Samhain, which marked the arrival of the “dark half” of the year. It was celebrated with bonfires”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“but it gave me back one area of my life in which I felt effective.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“everybody else is drowsing while I am wide awake and hounded by sharp fears.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“trying to find my way back to something I recognise.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This is where we are now, endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity while erasing the dirty underside of real life.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I don’t have the sort of body that makes me comfortable in a bikini on a summer’s day, but in the winter, I can show my skin to the sea and feel like I’m part of its elemental power.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Never having been a smoker in my life, I want a cigarette, just for the sense of occupation it would lend to my tongue and my lips, just for the feeling of transgression”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We must get back into relation: vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe . . . We must once more practice the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“As we so often find in ancient folklore, the Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I have a habit of spending a small fortune on industrial quantities of gin in which to douse windfalls of damsons, elderberries, or sloes.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a season that invites me to rest well, and feel restored, when I am allowed to retreat to be quietly separate.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“[In November] as soon as the sun goes down, I start thinking about bed.”
― 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I feel as though I’m cooking autumn into my house.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“At the moment, there are yards of books that I’m saving simply so that Bert will be able to put his hand to them when he’s a little older, before he starts forming a collection of his own. There will come a time when there’s no longer any point in clinging to them, and I’ll be able to whittle them down to the kernel of what I truly love. It will be like shedding a skin.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“we can deal only with what’s in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful 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. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“It’s one of the great privileges of adulthood to know that there’s nothing commonplace in watching a minke whale breaching a few metres from your boat,”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I am slyly pleased that I have pain to contend with, rather than a more nebulous sense of my own overwhelm. It feels more concrete somehow. I can hide behind it and say, See, I am not unable to manage my workload. I am legitimately ill.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I will give you an alternative if only. If only life were so stable, happy, and predictable as to produce ants instead of grasshoppers, year in, year out. The truth is that we all have ant years and grasshopper years—years in which we are able to prepare and save and years where we need a little extra help. Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up enough resources to cope with the grasshopper years, but in believing that each grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Usefulness is a useless concept when it comes to humans. I don’t think we were ever meant to think about others in terms of their use to us.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Getting into the sea on days when the temperature hovered around zero was an act of defiance against our own woes. By doing a resilient thing, we felt more resilient. That circular process of being resilient and feeling resilient kept us afloat.”
― 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

“When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times