Wintering Quotes

“Yes, I pray,’ she replies to herself, ‘earthwise rather than to any off-ground god – and, though I cannot tell you the words I use, I will tell you their core is beauty.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

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

“And winter sleeps are the best. I like my duvet thick and my bedroom cold, so that I have a chill to snuggle against. Unlike those terrible, wrestling summer nights when the room is always too close to allow that final descent into oblivion, the cool air affords deep sleep, and long, magical dreams. Waking in the night, the dark seems more profound and velvety than usual, almost infinite. 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: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“I don’t mind staying in at all. I realise that, for plenty of people, it feels like a brutal restriction of their freedom, but it suits me down to the ground. Winter is a quiet house in lamplight, stepping into 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: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“I have been hunting down a mirror for myself, a representation of how I feel at this moment in time. A severed child, caught between two worlds, not sure if I can believe in any solid future.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

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

“Some winters are gradual. Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Sometimes the best response to our house of anguish is the honest one: we need friends who winter along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom and who allow us to be weak for a while while we’re finding our feet again. We need people to acknowledge that we can’t always hang on in there. That sometimes everything breaks.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“As I walk, I remind myself of the words of Alan Watts: “To hold your breath is to lose your breath”. In the wisdom of insecurity what makes a case that always convinces me but which I always seem to forget that life is by nature uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security somehow and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless unpredictable change. That is the very essence of this life.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I have cut out sugar, I make sure I get plenty of alone time, I go on long walks and I’ve stopped saying yes to everybody. I’ve cut down my working hours. All of these things make a buffer and I say I like to keep my buffer broad. Sometimes problems come up that narrow my buffer and then I have to make sure I build it up again. Keeping well is almost a full-time job but I have a wonderful life.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But if happiness is a skill than sadness is too. Pephaps through all those years at school or perhaps through other terrors we are taught to ignore it, 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 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

“I was supposed to worry about his future qualifications more than his ability to be content. I was not willing to do that. I didn’t feel that the two should be in conflict achieving your potential and not being completely miserable.”
― 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 on the brink of somewhere else anyway.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“There’s a collector’s mentality online; our social worth is given a single blunt number. We have to make sure that we’re not fooled by it. We have to make the same assessments that we always did about the quality of those connections, their individual meanings to us and the nurture that they can realistically offer us. Just as with the physical world, many of these friends will melt away at the first sign of trouble. The only difference is that the numbers are bigger online, and our missed connections feel more visible. 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, 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”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Nobody had ever said to me: 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. I owe my life to him.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the 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

“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. Best of all, we can sing together, whole families knowing the same songs and giving them the same meaning.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We are not consistently useful to the world at large.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“There is a change in the air. Early morning, when I open the back door, it billows into the kitchen, crisp, cold, and fresh as mint. It makes white clouds of my breath. Winter has decorated ordinary life. Some days everything sparkles, glamorising the lids of bins and the tarmac patchwork of the pavements. Frost etches mysterious patterns on the roof of our car, and the puddles that collect in the gutter are crisp with ice.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“How is it that we can code so carefully the weight of loss, grief, time, and continuity into our children’s books, but forget them so thoroughly ourselves? 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

“In Iceland—where roads will soon close after the first snowfalls, and life has to cling tenaciously to the windswept lava—I have learned something about keeping warm. 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

“I feel as though I have disturbed a dormant kraken by pushing myself too far.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In the changing room later, I experience a different kind of warmth—the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren’t the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond all joy to be bikini-ready and tanned as an act of disguise. These are northern bodies, slack-bottomed and dimpling, with unruly pubic hair and the scars of cesareaen sections, chattering companionably in a language I don’t understand. They are a glimpse of life yet to come: a message of survival, passed on through the generations. It’s a message I rarely find in my buttoned-up home country, and I think about the times I’ve suffered silent furies at the treacheries of my own body, imagining them to be unique. We don’t know ourselves in context. But there is evidence of wintering here, freely shared like an exchange of precious gifts. That’s what you learn in winter: there is a past, a present, and a future. There is a time after the aftermath.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“hygge their word of the year. The meaning of this Danish term is now well known: it represents cosiness as a kind of mindful practice, a turning towards domesticated comfort to console us against the harshness of the world outside. I am currently burrowing into a hyggelig life, full of candles and tea, judicious quantities of cake, warm jumpers, chunky socks, plenty of time snuggling alone by a lit fire. 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

“There’s an unspoken rule to our preserving: you shouldn’t have paid for the main ingredient. It should be part of a glut, otherwise unwanted or impossible to use, or should be foraged from the wild, where it would only decay without your intervention. You don’t have to look back many generations to see how this was an essential supplement to scarce fresh produce in winter months, although today it’s perhaps more of an affectation, an aspect of my personal culture that I’m reluctant to concede.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“If I didn’t see my winter coming, then at least I have caught it in the early stages. I am just a little lost, that’s all; just a little clouded over, like my windows. I’m determined to go into it consciously, to make it a kind of practice in understanding myself better. I want to avoid making the same mistakes again. I am almost wondering whether there could be a pleasure in it, somewhere, if only I’m well enough prepared. I can feel the downturn coming; I know that baking and soup-making can’t sustain me forever. It will get worse than this: darker, leaner, lonelier. I want to lay down a bed of straw beneath me to cushion the blow when it comes. I want to make everything ready.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“But here I am, having worked so hard and for so long that I’ve made myself sick. And worst of all, I’ve nearly forgotten how to rest. I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough. And my house—my beloved home—has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner, and I have been helpless in the face of it. Since being signed off sick, I’ve been forced to lean back on the sofa and stare at the wreckage for hours at a time, wondering how the hell it got so bad. There’s not a single soothing place left in the house, where you can rest a while without being reminded that something needs to be mended or cleaned. The windows are clouded with the dusty veil of a hundred rainstorms. The varnish is wearing from the floorboards. The walls are dotted with nails that are missing their pictures or holes that should be filled and painted over. Even the television hangs at a drunken angle. When I stand on a chair and empty the top shelf in the wardrobe, I find that I have meant to replace the bedroom curtains at least three times in the last few years, and every bundle of fabric I’ve bought has ended up folded neatly and stowed away, entirely forgotten. That I’m noticing these things only now that I’m physically unable to remedy them feels like the kind of exquisite torture devised by vengeful Greek gods. 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 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. It’s a path I’ve 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

“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, 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

“Our knowledge of winter is a fragment of childhood, almost innate. All the careful preparations that animals make to endure the cold, foodless months; hibernation and migration, deciduous trees dropping leaves. This is no accident. The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive. Dormice laying on fat to hibernate, swallows navigating to South Africa, trees blazing out the final weeks of autumn. It is all very well to survive the abundant months of the 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