Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“That is wintering…the active acceptance of sadness…the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need…the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.” And so unfolds the idea at the heart of Katherine May’s work, “Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times”.

May writes with a soft-spoken voice, a series of stories scaffold by her logic but embellished with delicate invitations to witness the idea she outlines.

We live in interconnection with the natural world, she posits, and we too (human)s experience cycles of rest and retreat as we blunder through seasons. The call to witness left unattended festers into depression but honored may become an invitation into our deepest selves, revealing precisely who we are and what we need most.

Though this book serves well for those in times of grief, it is not exclusive to that particular experience of bereavement. In my body right now, May’s words act as a balm for this ambiguous loss I’ve not yet been able to fully articulate though the past year was chockfull of it. The words I use feel incomplete somehow but Katherine May has given us a new verb to add to the collective lexicon when attempting to articulate the experience of moving through the world with dimmed hope and hollowness - wintering.

For her eloquence, gentle rigor of thought, and fresh imagination - this reader is so grateful; may this time of rest evolve into the next of renewal under May’s prescient guidance.

#grief #griefliteracy #deathdoulareads #suffering #Wintering#rest #renewal #depression #anxiety