Courtney

“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

“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

“Keep in mind that when we were founded by those Americans of the eighteenth century, non had had any prior experience in revolutions or nation making. They were, as we would say, winging it. They were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the paper money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge in 1775, was forty-three, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was forty. Benjamin Rush - one of the most interesting of them all - was thirty when he signed the Declaration. They were young people, feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn't a bank in the entire country. It was a country of just 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery. And think of this: Few nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.”
― David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For

“Keep in mind that when we were founded by those Americans of the eighteenth century, none had had any prior experience in revolutions or nation making. They were, as we would say, winging it. They were idealistic and they were young. We see their faces in the old paintings done later in their lives or looking at us from the paper money in our wallets, and we see the awkward teeth and the powdered hair, and we think of them as elder statesmen. But George Washington, when he took command of the Continental Army at Cambridge in 1775, was forty-three, and he was the oldest of them. Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Adams was forty. Benjamin Rush - one of the most interesting of them all - was thirty when he signed the Declaration. They were young people, feeling their way, improvising, trying to do what would work. They had no money, no navy, no real army. There wasn't a bank in the entire country. It was a country of just 2,500,000 people, 500,000 of whom were held in slavery. And think of this: Few nations in the world know when they were born. We know exactly when we began and why we began and who did it.”
― David McCullough, The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For