Wintering Quotes

“Now my evenings have the consolation of mugs of emerald-green tea made with fresh mint. It’s not so bad, but the time seems to stretch, and 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

“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can’t quite keep pace.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Rituals are the doorways of the psyche, between the sacred and the profane, between purity and dirt, beauty and ugliness, and an opening out of the ordinary into the extraordinary,' writes Jay Griffiths. For my own part, they open up a space in which to host thoughts that I would otherwise find silly or ridiculous: a voiceless awe at the passing of time. The way everything changes. The way everything stays the same. The way those things are bigger than I am and more than I can hold.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The tree is waiting. It has everything already. Its 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 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

“I think about this a lot,' she says. 'The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can't have one without the other.”
― 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Believing in the unpredictability of my place on this earth - radically and deeply accepting it to be true - is something I can do only in fits and starts. It is in itself an exercise in mindfulness.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Celebrating that change in the presence of others made a difference. It added a little joy to that simple act of noticing and bolstered the dark need that lurked behind it with fellow human spirit. It took away a little of the shame at needing it.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I have flaws. I have restrictions. I have to change.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I want to be allowed to bask in the glory of my recovery from the brink, rather than to still be teetering on the edge of it, no matter what I do.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Life is clearly teaching me some kind of lesson, but I can't decipher it yet. I'm worried that it's about doing less, about staying at home and giving up on adventures for a while. That's not something I want to learn.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I told her about Iceland and how obviously, I wouldn't be able to go. "No," she said, "I think you should. What difference does it make to be in one country or another, if you're feeling ill anyway? You might as well enjoy these things. You never know what's around the corner.”
― 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

“This is a mirror of my own winter, or how it seems to me: 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

“We must learn to invite 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

“Nature shows that survival is a practice. Sometimes it flourishes---lays on flat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey---and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn't do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. It attends to this work each and every day. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans.

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. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just 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 things is certain: we will simply have new things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again.

In the meantime, 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

“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, maximizing 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 it's crucible.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on sparse beauty. It's a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.

Doing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, 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

“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.”
― 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

“One light is steady and sure, the other uncertain and flickering. . . . On balance, it's where I prefer to be: somewhere in the middle. Certainty is a dead space, in which there's no more room to grow. Wavering is painful. I'm glad to be travelling between the two.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Anxiety lurked in my body like groundwater, and every now and then it would rain and the level would rise up into my throat, surging into my sinuses, banking up behind my eyes.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive. . . . It is all very well to survive the abundant months of spring and summer, but in winter, we witness the full glory of nature's flourishing in lean times.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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. Emotionally, we're prone to stifling summers and low, dark winters, to sudden drops in temperature, to light and shade. Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we were able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime, we still couldn't avoid the winter. Our parents would age and die; our friends would undertake minor acts of betrayal; the machinations of the world would eventually weigh against us. Somewhere along the line, we would screw up. Winter would quietly roll in.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In winter, you are never more than a few steps from darkness.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“I have come to think of it as prayer, although I ask for nothing, and speak to no one within it. It is a profoundly non-verbal experience, a sharp breath of pure being amid a forest of words. It is an untangling, a moment to feel the true ache of desire, the gentle wash of self-compassion, the heart-swell of thanks, the tick tick tick of existence. It is a moment when, alone, I feel at my most connected with others. I can feel entirely separate in a crowd of people, but closing my eyes, I can feel as though I have walked into a river of all consciousness, bathed in common humanity.”
― 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, it’s 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.
Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness – one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is made in the blackest hours to repair the fragmented narratives of our days.
Yet we are pushing away this innate skill we have for digesting the difficult parts of life.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“/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 contemplation. It’s also a moment when I have to walk away from all the alliances, to let the strings of some friendships fall loose, if only for a while. It’s a pathway walked over and over again in my life. I have learned the skill set of wintering the hard way.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But if happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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