Amy N.

“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

“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

“Left alone, I was passive; repulsed, I withdrew; forgotten — my lips would not utter, nor my eyes dart a reminder.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“I often turn to children’s books at times like these, when I’m yearning to escape into a world that is beautifully rendered and complex, yet soothingly familiar.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times