A passage from Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Today, I thought I’d share a favorite passage from the book I just finished — Katherine May’s “Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.” She characterizes her practice of wintering not just in alignment with the seasons outside (although — hellooo Michigan winter… this is feeling particularly resonant in the here and now). It’s more in response to our personal (and sometimes collective) experiences: a diagnosis or illness, navigating a post-natal period, or burnout, or job loss. Maybe you’re in transition or in grief. Maybe you’re caretaking for an aging parent or ill relative, or serving the community as a front line worker or activist. Wintering, she says, is a season in all of our lives, try as we may to live in permanent equatorial summer sun. Our choice is not whether winter rolls in — it’s in how we choose to live with it. May writes:
“In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way it ravages us. An occasional sharp winter would do us good. 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 winter in.
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. 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, maximizing 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 we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s 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.”
The book is a quick and comforting read if you choose to pick it up, but you can also find an interview with the author over at the On Being podcast, here.