Kristen

“When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored 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 winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“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

“In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California, and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“You have blighted the freshness and promise of youth, and made my life a wilderness!”
― Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall