45. Wintering | Katherine May

The power of rest and retreat in difficult times

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I bought this book when she was published in February 2020. The Guardian review caught my eye and I especially loved this line:

"‘Reading it is like slipping into a fur coat. May could protectively convince us of anything: the pleasures of cold weather.’

I have a fear of running out of books to read so there’s usually a huge pile of books waiting tbr in my house. I didn’t get to Wintering until almost a year later, which ended up being perfectly timed as I started her a few days after I’d made the heartbreaking decision to put my 16 year old dog PJ to sleep. To be completely honest I wasn’t in the mood to read about winter at all (I guessed this was the theme of the book) given it was January which is without a doubt the darkest and most depressing month in the UK (imho).

I was wrong, it was the perfect time.

Wintering highlights the similarities between the cold season of the year and the period of hardship in a human life, by emphasising how everything eventually passes in time, and how we can learn to embrace challenging times by learning from wolves, from the cold, and how our ancestors dealt with the winter.

Think about winter for a minute. Every year, our planet is going through the cold season, shading its colors, vitality, and entering a dark time. But the earth knows that spring will follow, and that the cold times can only last so long. Facing the low temperatures, animals go into hibernation mode, and the entire world seems to stop and freeze, sometimes in a literal way. The beauty of all of this? Once the world reemerges, it is stronger than before.

Just like nature itself, we, too, go through different seasons in our lives. Some are easier, others are harder. Katherine May‘s book Wintering can show us that not everything about hardship is bad, and not every part of winter is meant to test us.

One of my favourite lines from the book:

"“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again” Katherine May

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From the back cover:

Wintering is a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life, times when we must retreat to care for and repair ourselves. Katherine May thoughtfully shows us how to come through these times with the wisdom of knowing that, like seasons, our winters and summers are the ebb and flow of life.

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