Wintering Quotes

“Life has been busy, and in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of my identity have been squeezed out. I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way. What can you do when you’re already doing everything? The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away.”
― 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”
― 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.”
― 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“It feels good to be making something, even while my contribution to the world feels very small. It allows me to imagine I’m part machine, fluid and efficient. And while”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“... 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 while 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

“Mine is a personal animism, hushed by my conscious brain, nurtured by my unconscious.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

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

“Life goes on abundantly in winter - changes made here will usher us into future glories.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I wonder if I am perhaps a little too beguiled by this, whether my sense of malaise is actually a lifestyle choice, an urge towards homely perfection to soothe the turmoil that until recently has lurked in my life.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simplest 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We may drift through years in which we feel like a negative presence in the world, but we are capable of coming back again.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Nature shows that survival is a practice.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“They say 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

“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. My own midnight terrors vanish when I turn insomnia into a watch: a claimed sacred space in which I have nothing to do but contemplate. Here, I am offered a place in between, like finding a hidden door, the stuff of dreams. Even dormice know how to do it: they wake a while and tend to business before surrendering back to sleep.

Over and again, we find that winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit. Yet still we refuse them. The work of the cold season is to learn to welcome them.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Once I abandon the fight to return to sleep and claim my wakefulness, I can find a slanting love for this part of the night, the almost-morning. As the only one awake, I luxuriate in a space in which I can drink in the silence. It’s an undemanding moment in the twenty-four-hour cycle. Nobody can reasonably expect you to be checking texts or emails, and the scrolling feeds of social media have fallen quiet. In a world where it’s hard to feel alone, this finally represents solitude.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But in recent weeks, my happy hibernation has been disrupted. I’ve come to call it the “terrible threes”: the dark insomniac hours when my mind declares itself, fully fired, in the middle of the night. It always happens at three a.m.: a long way past late, but too early to surrender and start the day. There, in the truest night, I lie in the dark and catastrophise.”
― 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But a prayer, at least, is something that happens silently, in secret. It is nothing that I have to advertise or discuss, and so I am able to be discreet about it, disingenuously hanging with the rationalists while I furtively seek the numinous. This urge towards ritual is something new and altogether more risky, because it makes my invisible devotions visible.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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.”
― 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. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting through the floorboards. I was surprised that I felt at home there. Winter had begun.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“[On New Year’s Eve] we burn the Christmas tree (stripped and chopped up earlier) while H and I sip cheap champagne.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We passed fjords where people were swimming despite the unthinkable cold, and I began to absorb the connection between beauty and hardiness that existed in this freezing place, the way that these people worked hard to maintain their contract with the sublime.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I spend the morning in the local grocers, bringing in the Christmas provisions: Stilton, ham, Brussels sprouts, a capon of terrifying dimensions. Unfathomable quantities of potatoes. Red wine and white, a bottle of Marsala. Turkish delight and cherry liqueur chocolates. A bag of satsumas, some wrapped in blue and gold paper. Several pots of cream, just in case.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In moments of helplessness, I always seem to travel north. I have a kind of boreal wanderlust, an urge towards the top of the world where the ice intrudes. In the cold, I find I can think straight; the air feels clean and uncluttered. I have faith in the practicality of the north, its ability to prepare and endure, the peaks and troughs of its seasons.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In the twenty-first century, we are awash in light, not just from the chandeliers and lamps that deliberately light up our homes in the evening, but also from the ever-growing legions of electronic devices that flicker and pulse and glow to tell us that they’re doing something. Light nowadays can feel like an intruder, carrying with it a unit of information or an obligation.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times