Wintering Quotes

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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

“It’s a peculiar thing, to lose the note where everyone tends to begin, but there it was. From then on, my scales started with an A, or even a few notes below. We would do run-ups to my C. I could find it if I thought of it as a long jump. Sometimes you need to take a few steps back and start somewhere else.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The ego flares like a struck match: bright, blue, fleeting. I am thankful to be alone when this happens, to let it burn out in private. We should sometimes be grateful for the solitude of night, of a winter. They save us from displaying our worst selves to the waking world.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I have been hunting down a mirror for myself, a representation of how I feel at this moment in time. A severed child caught between two worlds, not sure if I can believe in any solid future. It’s not exactly comforting to find it, but it’s certainly satisfying, like a shared moment of outrage or the pleasure of a sad film.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we only have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that, because it’s happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will one day be past history. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. But one thing is certain: we will simply have different things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again. In the meantime, we can only deal 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: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“That’s what we humans do: we make and remake our stories, abandoning the ones that no longer fit and trying new ones on for size.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but I do think it’s instructive.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I found my power in the fluster that is caused by asserting that you have less than other people. If grammar school was supposed to turn me into a nice young lady, it actually turned me into an urchin.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“So I finally let his words sink in. I pulled him out of school and shrugged off suggestions for ways to shoehorn him back in again: how to threaten and cajole; how to charm him into tolerating it; whether to medicate him into submission. I would do none of those things. I was not willing to get him back into school by breaking him, however desperate I was for my own time again. I, who had essentially liked the rhythm and challenge of school, came to realise how many people found school an utter endurance—yet many of them believed that our children should endure it, too, for fourteen painful years of their life. I was supposed to worry about his future qualifications more than his ability to be content. I was not willing to do that.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I’m finding myself in bed by nine, perhaps earlier if I can get away with it. It’s a profoundly unsociable way of living, but it gives me those clearheaded early mornings in the inky dark, when I light candles around the house and relish two straight hours when nobody can make any demands on me.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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. 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

“Life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalize our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our suffering, [Alan Watts] says, comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth: "Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“All of these things make a buffer, and I say I like to keep my buffer broad.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I went for a walk behind the studio where I go to write. I have what’s essentially a cupboard in an old farm building, one otherwise populated with visual artists. I can’t really justify any more space. A cupboard is all I need, and a narrow shelf on which to perch my laptop. In any case, I tend to spend more time walking than actually writing, striking off through the farm and into the fields beyond, where I can join onto the North Downs Way and walk to Canterbury in an hour if I want to. If I head the opposite way, there is a string of little country pubs, where I can sit for a while and pretend I’m gathering my wits about me.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I don’t power on through, I don’t put up a facade, and I don’t keep it in. I take a couple of days off and look after myself until I’m well again. I go to the sea, make sure I’m getting some good nutrition, cancel all my appointments, and rest until I’m better. I know what to do.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Gazing back at the water, I felt the urge to do it all over again, to go back and exist in those crystalline seconds of intense cold. My blood sparkled in my veins. I was certain that I could conquer it a second time around, could tolerate a little longer in that frozen claw. “That was brilliant,” I gasped.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I think again of . . . the way that snow draws you close to your family, forcing you to find moments of collective leisure in close quarters. The summer only disperses us. In winter, we find a shared language of comfort: candles, ice cream, coffee. Sauna. Fresh laundry.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I have always been that figure, reaching up towards impossible things. Today I am sick with those desires, trying to channel the infernal patience of parenthood while a dozen stories ball up in my throat, unable to be written. I’m scared that it might be forever, that one obstacle after another will prevent me from making the work I need to make in order to stay sane.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Druids follow the eightfold Wheel of the Year . . . which means that we have something to do every six weeks. It’s a useful period of time—you always have the next moment in sight. It creates a pattern through the year.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I gained something new: a welcome sense of insignificance amid a congregation of people; a lifting of the obligation to endlessly do, if just for an hour; a gentle truce with myself. I spent most of that time on the verge of tears. I needed to do no more than open up that tiny space to see how black it all was.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Having rumbled along on high for years, my stress level has reached a kind of crescendo. I feel physically unable to go into work, as though I’m connected to the house by a piece of elastic that pings me back indoors whenever I attempt my commute. It is more than a mere whim; it is an absolute bodily refusal. I’ve been pushing through this for a long time now, but something has finally snapped.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times