Wintering Quotes

“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

“I felt with great certainty that we should talk about these things and that I, having learned some strategies, should share them. It didn’t save me from another dip and another dip, but each time the peril became less. I began to get a feel for my winterings: their length and breadth, their heft. I knew that they didn’t last forever. I knew that I had to find the most comfortable way to live through them until spring.”
― 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

“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. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. Yet it’s also inevitable.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“didn’t matter, because I had given up on sleep anyway. Something had already shifted. 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 between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there. Winter had begun.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Some winters happen in the sun.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“Half-apologetic, I started to build a different kind of a person: one who was rude sometimes and who didn’t always do the right thing, and whose big stupid heart made her endlessly seem to hurt, but also one who deserved to be here, because she now had something to give.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“hold your breath is to lose your breath.” In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a time for the quiet arts of making, for knitting and sewing, baking and simmering, repairing and restoring our homes.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“in. I take a couple of days off and look after myself until I’m well again. I go to the sea, make sure I’m getting some good nutrition, cancel all my appointments, and rest until I’m better. I know what to do.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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

“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. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The greatest fear of the English is embarrassment.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I own nothing. I have nothing to show for my forty-odd years on this earth except for a pile of dusty books.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I, who had essentially liked the rhythm and challenge of school, came to realise how many people found school an utter endurance—yet many of them believed that our children should endure it, too, for fourteen painful years of their life.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“As John Cleese once said, the greatest fear of the English is embarrassment,”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed The speculating rooks at their nests cawed And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass, What we below could not see, Winter pass. Edward Thomas, “Thaw”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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. The warm weather destinations of the south seem unreal to me, its calendar too unchanging. I love the revolutions that winter brings.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I’m soon interrupting to tell her my own story about being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and finally realising that I couldn’t power my way out of it or find a therapy to fix me. The very permanence of the label—of having a brain that just happened to work in a certain way—was my salvation. I had to adapt. I had to surrender. The only thing breaking me was pretending to be like everyone else.”
― 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We, who have wintered, have learned some things. We sing it out like birds. We let our voices fill the air.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: what is this winter all about? I asked myself: what change is coming?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times