Wintering Quotes

“But here it is: my winter. It’s an open invitation to transition into a more sustainable life and to wrest back control over the chaos I’ve created. It’s a moment when I have to step into solitude and into contemplation. 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 a while.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“People admired me for how much I got done. I lapped it up, but felt secretly that I was only trying to keep pace with everyone else, and they seemed to be coping far better. After all, I had colleagues who regularly replied to emails after midnight, long after I was asleep. In actual fact, I was ashamed.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The night inches on. I could make a career out of worrying, if only anyone would pay me. What do I worry about during these long nights? Money. Death. Failure. The familiar horsemen of those quiet apocalypses that happen only when the sun‘s gone down. In the middle of the night, I can worry my house onto the edge of a cliff, forever about to topple onto the rocks below. I am only ever a missed wage packet away from total annihilation. I carry too much debt. I own nothing. I own too much...”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I may love the great outdoors in winter, but even I draw the line at sunset. When November comes, I have no desire to leave the house after dark. My instinct is to hibernate the evenings away. I hate those strange walks along the high street, lit only by street lamps and the glow of shop windows, the cold seeping up your coat sleeves. I don’t like the way that 4 o’clock can feel so desolate, the air damp without the corrective force of the sun./ The very thought of driving seems nightmarish – those impenetrable roads their edges uncertain; the dance you have to perform with the full beam, flicking it on and off, on and off. Far better to stay at home.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The life of a sociable insect has nothing to say about us. Our lives take different shapes. We do not work in a linear progression through fixed roles like the honeybee. We are not consistently useful to the world at large. We talk about the complexity of the hive, but human societies are infinitely more complex, full of choices and mistakes, periods of glory and seasons of utter despair. Some of us make highly visible, elaborate contributions to the whole. Some of us are part of the ticking mechanics of the world, the incremental wealth of small gestures. All of it matters. All of it weaves the wider fabric that binds us.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“But my prayers—earthwise as they are—take me to a place that I am unable to dissect or scrutinise, a space beyond words.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This, then, is how I turned my year: not in a single high-stakes moment, but in a series of gestures that gently acknowledge the change taking place but which have an eye on the continuities too.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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

“I am reminded yet again of the quiet value of ritual in my life, and of the words of D. H. Lawrence: “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 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

“We treat each wintering as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored. This means we’ve made a secret of an entirely ordinary process and have thereby given those who endure it a pariah status, forcing them to drop out of everyday life in order to conceal their failure. Yet we do this at a great cost. Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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

“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

“I didn’t feel that the two should be in conflict—achieving your potential and not being completely miserable. Happiness is the greatest skill we’ll ever learn.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I’ve learned them the hard way. When I started feeling the drag 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The choice of St. Lucy’s Day is significant here. These days, many Northern European countries mark her feast on 13 December, but in Donne’s time, it was celebrated on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, amid the oppressive darkness. It marked the beginning of Christmastide, and then, as now, the experience of grief must surely have been heightened in times of high spirits, when those in mourning can feel at their most isolated.”
― 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. We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. 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 whole slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In our winter, a transformation happened. We read and worked and problem-solved and found new solutions. 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

“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. The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition—perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year—we can get the measure of it.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Yet here I am, edging even closer to the abyss, throwing away the secure underpinnings of my life by leaving my secure job. In daylight, I can make an account of the stress that made the decision to leave a sensible one—the slow encroachment that ate into my family life. But that’s in the daytime, when I value such things as calm and freedom. In the dark, I am struck by a dyspeptic bout of conservatism. I should have a savings account containing a year’s salary. I should have proper life insurance. I have squandered something, somehow. I am not sure what or when, but I despise myself for it. The precariousness of my life bites me hard. I can feel its teeth in my gut. I am nothing, I am no one, I have failed.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I didn’t deserve a holiday. Are you even allowed a holiday when you’re signed off from work? What on earth would people think if they found out? We’ve moved a long way away from the time when we saw a recuperative break as a legitimate strategy to aid your recovery. I wonder if there’s any room left for recovery at all. We are either off or on.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I am still at home. 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

“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 in there; 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: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

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

“I am not being lazy. I’m not slacking. I’m just letting my attention shift for a while, away from the direct ambitions of the rest of my year. It’s like revving my engines.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly inaccurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; 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. Underneath this chaos and clutter lies a longing for more elemental things--love, beauty, comfort, a short spell of oblivion once in a while.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This isn’t about getting you fixed. 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

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