Kristen

“The scope of what must be resisted today -- imagine, by itself, the juggernaut of ever present advertising, its promises of wealth, power, beauty, ease, youth, its beguiling dead ends -- is breathtaking.”
― Barry Lopez, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

“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

“Unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savored. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shring from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but it's instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us 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....normal feelings become monstrous when they're denied.”
― 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, maximizing 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 it's crucible.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on sparse beauty. It's a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.

Doing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, resting, is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you'll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you'll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don't then that skin will harden around you.

It's one of the most important choices you'll ever make.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times