In the heart of winter, in -40 Celcius, there is something about reading a book about wintering. On a friend’s recommendation, I picked up Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May and this book taught me so much while allowing me to introspect and reflect. Almost a month later, I am working through the things I learned and I hope that if you choose to pick it up, you will have a wonderful experience yourself! Let’s take a look at the synopsis first and then I will share some quotes and notes.
An intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.
Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.
A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.
Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.
Content Notes: Mental illness, Medical content, Cancer, Panic attacks/disorders, Grief
My Thoughts on Wintering
For this book, I am all about the quotes!
On Wintering
We have turned the year.
Pg 126, December, Wintering
With New Year around the corner, it is common to say Happy New Year and welcome the new beginning. In recent years, I have moved away from celebrating new years because I try to think of my birthday as the main change. But something was different this year!
Maybe it was the sheer number of things that happened in 2021 or my new outlook of approaching the blog and reading. I feel like I made so many strides in the last year that I wanted to be excited for a new year. These words from the book, “We have turned the year” is a beautiful way of acknowledging all that happened. We do not have control over the passage of time but we do have control over how it passes and what we fill it with. These words give that power back to us, reminding us that it isn’t all about flowing with time – we decide what to do with it and in the course of the year, we grow, we change, and we do things!
Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. […] However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.
Yet it’s also inevitable.
Pg 10/11, September, Wintering
I don’t know about you but I feel like the pandemic has been the time for multiple winters. With staying inside, I have particularly had a lot of time to think for myself and adapt to the changes in work-from-home life. With almost losing my job, I had time to reflect on the relationship between work and my self-worth. Through experimentation, I have also analyzed my relationship to my blog and social media.
Since reading this book, I have also been able to identify that need deep inside me which drives me to be by myself. To give space to my thoughts and just do better. Those times of disconnection are wintering and I love that in the process of listening to them and going into wintering mode, I have also been able to develop a support system that can reach me in my darkest and loneliest moments.
It does not take our brain much to feel sidelined or rejected. Overthinking leads us to remunerate on bad feelings. We are never ready for this deep look at ourselves but when confronted with it, when we feel it’s time to tackle it, Wintering reminds us that we can do whatever we want. The timing might not be in our hands but the path is. Katherine puts it very well in this next quote:
We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they’re asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.
Pg 13, September
On Resilience
I recently saw a video about Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (shoutout to Nora for sharing it with me!). Eryn Colleen concisely shares the three ways in which we seek meaning according to Frankl. The first way is by doing something significant, whether it is work or any cause that we dedicate our time to. The second way is through love and family. Caring for others (Wintering elaborates on why we have pets) is a great way to find meaning. In concentration camps, neither of these were possible. People were separated from their loved one and the kind of work that they were made to do, in the horrible conditions that they lived, there was nothing to derive meaning from.
Except suffering.
Similar to how we control what happens through the year, we also control how to deal with suffering. It may not be as extreme as concentration camps, even the constant barrage of negative thoughts and emotions can be causes for suffering. The very thoughts that lead us into wintering are the ones that will teach us to be resilient and to derive meaning.
By doing a resilient thing, we felt more resilient. That circular process of being resilient and feeling resilience kept us afloat.
Pg 191, February
I think about the number of times I have tried to learn more about myself, the way I do things and why I pursue them. There is a lot of satisfaction that comes from understanding ourselves and then taking the steps needed to grow. To make a change. To live like we want to.
On Hobbies
I love how Katherine describes winter!
In winter, we find a shared language of comfort: candles, ice cream, coffee. Sauna. Fresh laundry.
Pg 175, February
In winter, I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight – slow, spiritual reading, a reinforcement of the soul. Winter is the time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of half-understood concepts or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.
Pg 210, March
Through her words, I started to rethink my connection with hobbies. It was around the time I was reading this book that I was pondering what I wanted to do with Instagram. While I am still on that platform (and I am not the kind to deactivate accounts so I will always be there), a few things happened in 2021 to make me disillusioned by how Instagram is used by a lot of people and in my attempt to be authentic and not chase likes and followers, I have had to have some tough conversations with myself, acknowledging truths that I would rather not.
I have lost that love for staging that I was pursuing when I didn’t know there was a game to play. Staging was a hobby I pursued excitedly for years and now it was time to make space for a new hobby potentially, meantime rediscovering the novelty of it by posting less and becoming more in tune with when I want to do it rather than if I have to do it.
Ariel and Lauren both have been into embroidery lately and I thought I might try that but I ended up choosing knitting. I have many memories of my grandma knitting and I don’t miss any opportunity to be close to her. That is one other thing about winter and Wintering – if there is sadness to feel, it will show up. So many times this winter, and 2021 itself, I have thought and grieved for my grandma, and it is not over yet. Maybe never will be.
Through Wintering, I noticed my own seasonal tendencies. I burn a lot of candles through winter and the passionate baker in me makes an appearance around Christmas. I started knitting with the following in mind: I don’t expect it to be something I do every year and every season. I do it to do something with my hands. Once I get good at it, I can make clothes and little things for my family and friends. It represents a way of giving and care that no other hobby does! Connecting it back to Victor Frankl’s book, it is a way to find meaning.
This is very different from the unintentional manner in which I started other hobbies, namely staging books and blogging. I did not set intentions for them and while one (blogging) evolved into something that is evergreen and all year around for me, with staging, I am trying to find a new footing. So far, it’s going well!
On Life Lessons
When Lauren and I discussed Moon of the Crusted Snow, we talked about dreams in the book. While why the characters had the dreams they did would be an interesting question to answer, the fact that the dreams reminded them of knowledge long unused or glimpsing a future that is very different from their represent time all point to their minds and hearts warning them in a way about what is to come and what will be needed of them to survive. That book was set in winter and it took this little community that had lost its ways on how to live on the land to reconnecting with them through the knowledge that the elders have. And to survive. The passage below reminded me of how the concept of Wintering was portrayed in that book:
Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on and in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have ventured before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out. They may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in the way that you never would. This isn’t just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering. And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrong-headed attitude that we never held. [… ] We learn to look more kindly on other people’s crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.
Pg 122, December, Wintering
That last line about looking kindly at other people and learning from their crisis is crucial. When we hear of others’ misfortunes, our brain goes “that can’t happen to me” but the truth is that death, separation, suffering are all part of the human experience and while those emotions might not come knocking today or in five years, none of us are immune from them. They will arrive in their own way in their own time.
Wintering is about using the knowledge from the past and helping each other. It is about reflecting and becoming stronger. I love the concept and the book!
Add this book to your TBR on Goodreads and The StoryGraph if you are interested in giving it a read! I hope that the passages I have shared have given you an idea of whether this book is for you!
Thank you for reading. I appreciate you taking time out for this. 🙂
Banner Photo by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash
Thanks for this beautiful post, Kriti. Although it is 33°C where I live in Australia, the concept of wintering is, as you note, apt for these pandemic times. We are currently dealing with the Omicron wave, official lockdowns having given way to self-imposed isolation. This year as in 2020, when I lost both parents in close succession, I found myself doing exactly what this book recommends: taking time to just be, feel the feelings (especially grief) and to do gentle ‘work’ like birdwatching, crochet, jigsaw puzzles… I called it ‘cocooning’—wintering by another name. Being a chronic extrovert, I probably wouldn’t have responded in this way of it wasn’t for Covid lockdowns. And I do believe it helped me to process what I was going through.
More power to you, Angela
Hi Angela! Always a pleasure to hear from you! I love ‘cocooning’ as another word for ‘wintering’. It is more cozy and has a positive ring to it. The pandemic has had its plus points and it has been a good thing to process our feelings and just feel/be. Take care through this new wave!
This sounds like a book I need to read right now. “Man’s Search for Meaning” is one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read and one that I often think about during hard times. This was a beautiful post, Kriti. Thank you for sharing about this book. I think I might get it for myself.
I am so glad you found a book that you want to read and liked the post. 🙂 I haven’t read Man’s Search for Meaning, though I have read a few books set in concentration camps. Looking forward to getting into that at some point in the future!