Wintering Quotes

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

“Nobody had ever said to me before, "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

“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 when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both in fact require a little perspective.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I recognized winter. I saw it coming (a mile off, since you ask), and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I've learned them the hard way. 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

“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

“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 often come around again. 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. 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

“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. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our suffering, he says, comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth.”
― 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 favoured 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

“We must emerge slowly from our wintering. We must test the air and be ready to shrink back into safety when blasted by unseasonal winds; we must gradually unfurl our new leaves. There will still be the debris of a long, disordered season. These are the moments when we have to find the most grace: when we come to atone for the worst ravages of our conduct in darker times, when we have to tell truths that we’d rather ignore. Sometimes we will have to name our personal winters, and the words will feel barbed in our throats: grief, rejection, depression, illness. Shame, failure, despair.”
― 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. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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, and 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 when we can’t bear to get out of bed. Both are normal. Both, in fact, require a little perspective.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“While I'm in the water, I’m laughing and laughing. All my automatic thoughts switch off. I always dip my head under to make sure the cold gets to my brain. And afterwards, I can’t remember what was even worrying me. A switch has been flicked. It’s a physical thing.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This has been a long journey for me, and swimming is just one of the changes I’ve made. I’ve 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

“In the eusocial [bee] hive, just a single wintering would result in being driven out for the greater good. And it may well be true that a bee can't recover. But a human can. We may rift through years in which we feel like a negative presence in the world, but we are capable of coming back again. We can return to family and friends not only restored but capable of bringing more than we brought before: greater wisdom, more compassion, an increased capacity to reach deep into our roots and know that we will find water.”
― 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“When I’m stressed, it feels like my brain has turned to porridge and it’s coming out of my ears. The drugs for my bipolar never really stopped that. Cold water does.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This isn’t about getting you fixed. This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Many of the trees and bushes put their finery away for the season and slept in their plain brown skins until the spring warmth would wake them again, and coax out their colors and cooling shade.”
― Marti Healy, The Secret Child

“Sun is bright sky is clear, ocean calling you to swimm enjoy don't forget winter will come where you'll respect water and being friends of blankets, life is like that enjoy the moment remember the feature.”
― Nozipho N.Maphumulo

“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

“I don’t power on through, I don’t put up a facade, and I don’t keep it 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

“I went for a walk behind the studio where I go to write. I have what’s essentially a cupboard in an old farm building, one otherwise populated with visual artists. I can’t really justify any more space. A cupboard is all I need, and a narrow shelf on which to perch my laptop. In any case, I tend to spend more time walking than actually writing, striking off through the farm and into the fields beyond, where I can join onto the North Downs Way and walk to Canterbury in an hour if I want to. If I head the opposite way, there is a string of little country pubs, where I can sit for a while and pretend I’m gathering my wits about me.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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