Wintering Quotes

“Here on the deck of the Andrea in the outer reaches of the Atlantic, approaching a personal winter, 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

“The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“While I'm in the water, I’m laughing and laughing. All my automatic thoughts switch off. I always dip my head under to make sure the cold gets to my brain. And afterwards, I can’t remember what was even worrying me. A switch has been flicked. It’s a physical thing.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“How could I ever admit that I chose the muffled roar of starlings over the noisy demands of the workplace?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Certainty is a dead space, in which there's no more room to grow. Wavering is painful. I'm glad to be traveling between the two.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a quiet house in lamplight, a spin 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

“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. We keep pets for the pleasure of looking after them; we voluntarily feed extra mouths and scoop up excrement in little plastic bags, declaring it relaxing. We channel our adoration towards the most helpless citizens of all—babies and children—for reasons that have nothing to do with their future utility. We flourish in caring, on doling out love. The most helpless members of our families and communities are what stick us together. It's how we thrive. Our winters are social glue.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“As children, we tolerate working conditions that we'd find intolerable as adults: the constant exposure of our attainment to a hostile audience; the motivation by threat instead of encouragement (and big threats, too: if you don't do this, you'll ruin your whole future life . . .); the social world in which you're mocked and teased, your most embarrassing desires exposed, your new-formed body held up for the kind of scrutiny that would destroy an adult. Often, during childhood, this comes with physical threats, too—being pushed and shoved on the playground, punched and kicked. The eternal menace that something more savage is waiting around the corner on your way home. Imagine how that would feel to you as an adult: that perpetual threat to your bodily integrity and your mental wellbeing. We would never stand for it, but we did as children because it was expected of us and we didn't know any better.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“start to retell my own story again, if only to myself. That’s what humans do: we make and remake our stories, abandoning the ones that no longer fit and trying on new ones for size. I am now telling myself the story of a pattern of work that I fell into by mistake, because I was afraid that I would never find my feet again”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. 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. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible. Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you. It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.”
― 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. We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours. In song, we have permission to rehearse all our heartbreaks, all our lusts. In song, we can console our children while they are still too young to judge our rusty voices, and we can find shortcuts to ecstasy while performing the mundane duty of a daily shower or scrubbing down the kitchen after yet another meal.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Happiness is our potential, the product of a mind that’s allowed to think as it needs to, that has enough of what it requires, that is free of the terrible weight of bullying and humiliation.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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

“We changed our focus away from pushing through with normal life and towards making a new one. When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs. That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed.”
― 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. I always read brutality in those messages: they offer next to nothing. There are days when I can say with great certainty that I am not strong enough to manage. And what if I can’t hang on in there? What then? These people might as well be leaning into my face, shouting, Cope! Cope! Cope! while spraying perfume into the air to make it all seem nice. The subtext of these messages is clear: Misery is not an option. We must carry on looking jolly for the sake of the crowd. While we may no longer see depression as a failure, we expect you to spin it into something meaningful pretty quick. And if you can’t pull that off, then you’d better disappear from view for a while. You’re dragging down the vibe.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“There is not enough night left for us. We have lost our true instincts for darkness, its invitation to spend some time in the proximity of our dreams. Our personal winters are so often accompanied by insomnia: perhaps we’re drawn towards that unique space of intimacy and contemplation, darkness and silence, without really knowing what we’re seeking. Perhaps, after all, we are being urged towards our own comfort.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This is a time in which very few activities seem right. Mostly I read at this hour, perusing the pile of books that live by my favourite chair, waiting to offer up fragments of learning, rather than inviting cover-to-cover pursuits. I browse a chapter here, a segment there, or hunt through an index for a matter that’s on my mind. I love such loose, exploratory reading. For once, I am not reading to escape; instead, having already made my getaway, I am able to roam through the extra space I’ve found, as restless and impatient as I like, revelling in the play of my own absorption. 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

“I realise suddenly how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia. I am afraid of being doubted, and I’m afraid of being found out. I am wondering what all those other people, whom I used to see every day, are thinking of me. Are they gossiping, or has some moribund discretion fallen over my name? I’m not sure which is worse. 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. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that’s not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone else to understand.
Most of all, I want to disappear. I’m almost desperate to find a way to absent myself easily from the situation, like cutting around my outline with a craft knife and cleanly excising myself from the record. But that, I know, would only leave a human-shaped hole. I imagine everybody gazing into the space where I ought to be.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“When I’m stressed, it feels like my brain has turned to porridge and it’s coming out of my ears. The drugs for my bipolar never really stopped that. Cold water does.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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

“Sometimes writing is a race against your own mind, as your hand labours to keep up with the tide of your thoughts, and I feel that most acutely at night, when there are no competing demands on my attention. That slightly sleepy, dazed state erodes the barriers of my waking brain. My dreams are still present, like an extra dimension to my perception. But crucially, my sensible daytime self, bossy and overbearing, still slumbers. Without its overseeing eye, I can see different futures and make imaginative leaps. I can confess all my sins to a piece of paper with no one to censor it.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“That's what humans do: we make and remake our stories, abandoning the ones that no longer fit and trying on new ones 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. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that 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. We seem to be living in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression; we’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, and yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied. A great deal of life will always suck. There will be moments when we’re riding high, and moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective.

Sometimes the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one. We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we're finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can't always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind. To find our own grit, in our own time.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Like the robin, we sometimes sing to show how strong we are, and we sometimes sing in hope of better times. We sing either way.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The loose communities that we find in spiritual or religious gatherings were once entirely ordinary to us, but now it seems more radical to join them, a brazen challenge to the strictures of the nuclear family, the tendency to stick within tight friendship groups, the shrinking away from the awe-inspiring. Congregations are elastic, stretching to take in all kinds of people and bringing up unexpected perspectives and insights. We need them now more than ever.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Halloween is no longer a time for remembrance, but it still reveals or need to enter liminal spaces: those moments when we're standing on the boundary between fear and delight, and those times when we wish that the veil between the living and the dead would lift for a while. But most of all, it hints at the winter to come, opening the door to the dark season, and reminding us of the darknesses that lurk in all our futures.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times