Wintering The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Her name is Katherine May and she is the New York Times bestselling author of Enchantment, Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age and Wintering, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which has been translated into 25 languages around the world.

Her name is Katherine May and she is the New York Times bestselling author of Enchantment, Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age and Wintering, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which has been translated into 25 languages around the world.

You may know her from her gorgeous book and her on-being episode on wintering, wintering as a season in the natural world and a recurrent season in every human life.

Katherine May's books of fiction and memoir include Wintering, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

You may know her from her gorgeous book and her on-being episode on wintering, wintering as a season in the natural world and a recurrent season in every human life.

Katherine May's books of fiction and memoir include 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 they lived in the summer. They prepare, they adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.

Wintering 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. It's a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.

with wintering, there are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world and sometimes they open you and you fall through them into somewhere else. And somewhere else, which is now capitalized, somewhere else runs at a different pace to the here and now where everyone else carries on.

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'd 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.

We need friends who wince 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 who acknowledge that we can't always hang on, but sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves, to give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind, to find our own grit in our own time.

some winters happen in the sun

with wintering, there are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world and sometimes they open you and you fall through them into somewhere else. And somewhere else, which is now capitalized, somewhere else runs at a different pace to the here and now where everyone else carries on.

I'm beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life, a pure basic emotion to be respected, if not savored. I'd 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.

There were times when I thought that I probably couldn't write this, but I wasn't up to it. But doing so would bring about some kind of catastrophe of embarrassment just for having the guile to think that I had anything to say on the matter. Once upon a time, this would have engulfed me entirely for a season and I would have emerged in a year or two shaking my head and starting again. But here I am and here it is. The only difference, the only reason I've finished this is experience. I recognised 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.