sam thomas ’s Reviews > Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times > Status Update

“As we so often find in ancient folklore, the Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which energies of spring arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter. We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. Instead we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is the brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” pg. 68