Hannah Harder

“Don't make yourself into a battlefield; the world doesn't need anymore fanatics.

If a habit is hard to shift, it's likely to have been transmitted to us through several generations, or held in place by society, culture, and our context, or environment.

We can discover a lot about ourselves and our Ancestors, as we begin to make changes to align our choices with our values.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

“I’m feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can’t imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that’s not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone else to understand.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Sometimes the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one. We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on. That 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“In twenty-first-century Britain, we've linked singing with talent, and we've got that fundamentally wrong. The right to sing is an absolute, regardless of how it sounds to the outside world. We sing because we must. We sing because it fills our lungs with nourishing air, and lets our hearts soar with the notes we let out. We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours. In song, we have permission to rehearse all our heartbreaks, all our lusts. In song, we can console our children while they are still too young our rusty voices, and we can find shortcuts to ecstasy while performing the mundane duty of a daily shower or scrubbing down the kitchen after yet another meal.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times