Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
I first learned of this book while I was participating in a book club for a different book last fall with Alicia and it has been on my TBR list since. Just because of the title I decided it would be a great book to start the year with and I wasn’t wrong but just to be clear you could read this book at any time of the year.
May defines wintering in this way, “Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you are cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast in the role of an outsider.” Wintering might creep into your life slowly or it might happen suddenly, but May adds, “However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.”
In the book May uses her own life to illustrate what she means by wintering and steps she personally took to get through a particular difficult time in her life. It is clear in the book that nature is very important to the author, and she uses examples from nature to show how wintering in our personal lives mimics the changes that happen in nature during the winter months.
The book had a lot of good take aways with the main one being that there are going to be times in our lives when we need to find ways to rest and take care of ourselves without guilt. So often we just “power through” when what we really need is to take a step away or take a time out so that we don’t burn out completely.
One of my favorite parts of the book was when May described a trip that she took to the Arctic circle to see the Northern lights. I’m sure my hope to take a trip like this sometime is why this part of the book resonated with me, but when she described seeing the northern lights for the first time she describes how all the images she had seen before had been misleading and then goes on to say, “I honestly don’t think I would have ever spotted them at all had I not been told they were there.” By the end of the trip May made this observation, “I spotted the faint glow of the aurora above the harbour and supposed it might have been there all along. Just waiting for me to learn how to see it.” This spoke volumes to me, and it is what I keep thinking about after I have finished reading the book.
The book contains so many stories that help the reader see that sometimes “we must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter but we can choose how.”
The best part of the book is May’s descriptive writing style. Whether she is writing about being at Stonehenge to see the sunrise for the winter solstice or swimming in the winter sea, she has a wonderful way of describing the events as they unfold.
Again, while you don’t have to wait until winter to read Wintering, I’m glad that I did. Looking outside at the snow while I was reading somehow enhanced the experience.