Wintering Quotes

“The year will move on either way”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“More than any other season”
― 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. Everyday life is often isolated, dreary, and lonely. A little craving is understandable. A little craving might actually be the rallying cry of survival”
― 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.”
― 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

“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

“Sleeping is my sanity, my luxury, my addiction.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Spring cleaning is an instinctive response to the end of winter.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“They have a habit of appearing when you’re at a low ebb, as if to encourage you onwards by reminding you that there is some magic left in the world.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Aprendemos a ver las crisis de los demás con más bondad, porque muchas veces son presagios de nuestro propio futuro.”
― Katherine May, Invernando. El poder del descanso y del refugio en tiempos difíciles

“Transformation is the business of winter.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Happiness is the greatest skill we’ll ever learn.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“It expresses a craving that so many of us will recognise. Have we really got so far into the realm of electric light and central heating that the rhythm of the year is irrelevant to us, and we no longer even want to notice the point at which the nights start getting shorter again?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Here was a group of people who were willing to share their chosen place of worship and to respect one another's mode of celebration. They didn't seek the bullying voice of consistency or conformity; they didn't denounce one another as following a divergent path. They just did their thing and let others do theirs.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In the high summer, want to be outside and active; in winter, we are called inside, and here we attend to all the detritus of the summer months, when we were too busy to take the necessary care. Winter is when I reorganise my bookshelves and read all the books I acquired in the previous year and failed to actually read. It is also the time when I reread beloved novels, for the pleasure of reacquainting myself with old friends. In summer, I want big, splashy ideas and trashy page-turners, devoured while lounging in a garden chair or perching on one of the breakwaters on the beach. In winter, I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight—slow, spiritual reading, a reinforcement of the soul. Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.”
― 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“By closing my eyes, however briefly, and resting my thoughts on the core of my perception, I can gain some of the peace that meditation brings me. 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 nonverbal 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 am at my most connected with others. I can feel entirely separate in a crowd of people, but when I close my eyes, it’s as though I have waded into a river of all consciousness, bathed in common humanity.”
― 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“For Watts, the only moment we can depend on is the present: that which we know and sense right now. The past is gone. The future, to which we devote so much of our brainpower, is an unstable element, entirely unknowable, “a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp.” When we endlessly ruminate over distant times, we miss extraordinary things in the present moment. These extraordinary things are, in actual fact, all we have: the here and now. The direct perception of our senses. Whenever I return to Watts’s work, a small, rebellious voice rises up in me and shouts: That’s not fair! Life is more secure for some people than for others! But that doesn’t make his wisdom any less true. Watts isn’t offering us a cheap, puffed-up solution to the vagaries of life. He isn’t telling us that if we can only master this small trick of thought, all our dreams will come to fruition. He is telling us the truth. Change will not stop happening. The only part we can control is our response.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Ghosts may be a part of the terror of Halloween, but our love of ghost stories betrays a far more fragile desire: that we do not fade so easily from this life. We spend a lot of time talking about leaving a legacy in this world, grand or small, financial or reputational, so that we won’t be forgotten. But ghost stories show us a different concern, hidden under our bluster: we hope that the dead won’t forget us. We hope that we, the living, will not lose the meanings that seem to evaporate when our loved ones die.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“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

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

“When you start tuning in to winter, you realise that we live through a thousand winters in our lives—some big, some small.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Love has such power that it seems worth the pain of its ending.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a season that invites me to rest well and feel restored, when I am allowed to retreat and be quietly separate.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I raid the cupboards for candles and hang fairy lights in the murkier corners, and I 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would. This isn’t just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering. And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held. Either that, or we become certain that there must be someone out there we can blame.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“an atavistic impulse on my part, a desire to find life in the world around me, the trees and stones and bodies of water, the birds and mammals that enter my line of sight. 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