Book Club | Wintering (Katherine May)

In our February Book Club, we met to discuss ‘Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times‘ by Katherine May. Here are my notes on the book.

Book Notes

Katherine May describes “Wintering” as “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.” Through a sudden crisis, the loss of something or someone, or a gradual drift, Wintering is about allowing rest and retreat to come. Rather than fighting it, pretending it isn’t happening, or wishing it away, Wintering is an acknowledgement that we can actively partner with the season and find healing, not despite it, but within it. “After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?”

September – Indian Summer

• We treat each winter as an embarrassing anomaly that should be hidden or ignored
• We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how
• Wintering is a moment when you need to shed a skin. This is a radical act – choosing to slow down, letting spare time expand, and getting enough rest. If you shed this skin, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel raw. But if you don’t, the old skin will harden around you.
• What are some of the default ways we resist and fight this process?

October

Making Ready

• The problem with doing everything is it ends up feeling like nothing. It’s a haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away.
• Katherine talks about “cooking Autumn into the house” after being signed off from work with severe abdominal pain. The preparation of food provides anchors in space and time
• Preparing for Winter before it is with us – In Finland, the winter arrives suddenly, and you don’t mess with it (having the wardrobe stowed away for when it comes)
• Daily routines keep us on an even keel
• All this time is an unfathomable luxury, and I’m struck by the uncomfortable feeling that I’m enjoying it a little too much
• Can I justify a walk when everyone else is doubling up to cover my job? The things that make us well are sources of guilt and shame (rest and healing are perceived as luxuries)

Hot Water

• Katherine decided to cancel her big 40th birthday trip to Iceland – she didn’t think she was physically strong or steady enough. But the biggest fear was judgement – are you even allowed to go on holiday when you’re signed off from work? What would people think if they found out? But the doctor gave a YOLO permission slip and told her to go
• In moments of helplessness, I always seem to travel north. I find I can think straight, the air feels clean and uncluttered
• “In sauna” – Hanne is not talking about a building, she’s talking about a state of being. For Finns, sauna is more than having a sauna, it’s a cornerstone around which life is built – birth, death, deep conversations, and a ritual cleansing of body, mind, and soul

Ghost Stories

• Halloween represents an invitation on the calendar, to acknowledge the present absences and absent presence of those we have lost
• It is also where we can occupy the liminal space between worlds, thoughts and feelings – where fear and delight become inseparable, life and death, inside and outside

November

Metamorphosis

• Amid the transformation of winter – the unwelcome change – is an abundance of life
• We meet Shelly, who tells her story of recovering from life-threatening bacterial meningitis – it’s not a heroic tale of triumph over illness, there is no path or methodology, she just waited it out and carried on with life…she didn’t witness it, she didn’t have to look at her daughter in a coma (it was not her wintering – that came later when she was in a state of sofa surfing limbo after her parents moved to America and her relationship broke down) – she began a new creative project that on reflection represented a process of her own healing and regrowth
• The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it – you can’t have one without the other

Slumber

• Winter is a season that invites me to rest well and feel restored, when I am allowed to retreat and be quietly separate
• Waking up in the middle of the night, the precariousness of my life bites me hard. Its teeth in my gut. I am nothing. I am no one. I have failed.
• We should sometimes be grateful for the solitudes of night, of a winter. They save us from displaying our worst selves to the waking world
• Roger Erkich argues that, before the industrial revolution, it was normal to divide the night into two periods of sleep: first (dead) sleep and second sleep with the “watch” in between, a borderland space between wake and sleep, with dreamlike conversations and slow meandering connection
• Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness – one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights
• My midnight terrors vanish when I turn insomnia into a watch: a claimed, sacred space in which I have nothing to do but contemplate

December

Light

• Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is most prevalent in countries like the UK, where the changing seasons bring about marked differences in light exposure across the year
• Saint Lucy didn’t cure me. I didn’t dance back up the aisle, having miraculously found my way. But she brought a little light. Just enough to see by.

Midwinter

• The winter solstace at Stonehenge brings an almost bewildering mix of cultures…we’re interlopers here but I’m not sure what interloper means in this context…the crowd is too diverse for us to stand out
• “We have turned the year”
• I find that I’m drawn to moments like this: an uplift in the monotonous progress of the year, and a way to mark the movement to the next phase
• Druids follow the eight-fold Wheel of the Year, which is a useful period of time…we have something to do every six weeks. It creates a pattern through the year. In mainstream culture we have Christmas and maybe a summer holiday, which leaves far too long between festivals
• This expresses a craving many of us will recognise – rituals that anchor us in time
• The loose communities that we find in spiritual or relivious gatherings were once entirely ordinary to us, but now it seems like it is more radical to join them. Congregations are elastic, stretching to take in all kinds of people, and bringing up unexpected perspectives and insights. We need them now more than ever.
• If we resist the instinct to endure those darkest moments alone, we might even make the opportunity to share the burden, and to let a little light in

Epiphany

• Some winters are gradual. Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them.
• Happiness is our potential, the product of a mind that’s allowed to think as it needs to, that has enough of what it requires, that is free of the terrible weight of bullying and humiliation. As children we tolerate working conditions that we’d find intolerable as adults: the constant interrogation of our attainment to a hostile audience, the motivation by threat instead of encouragement (and big threats too: if you don’t do this, you’ll ruin your whole future life)
• 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 wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out.
• I make a new ritual for the Christmas period this year, in those twelve days that I always struggle to fill meaningfully. It starts at the solstice and ends on New Year’s Day

January

Darkness

• There is nothing showy about the northern lights, nothing obvious or demanding. They hide from you at first, and then they whisper to you.
• The Sámi are a people whose territory extends across the north of the peninsula where Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia now join, although they have continuously inhabited it for close to ten millennia
• I simply had no defence against the changes that were happening in my life. I was missing my antlers. I had skittered over to a different country to convince myself that I could carry on just as normal, but instead I only saw my own desperation, mirrored in the ice. But it was there, too, that I came to a kind of acceptance: of my own limitations, and of the future that lay before me.
• I have learned to walk at these moments. I have learned to walk until the heat goes out of it.

Hunger

• Wherever we want to denote the hunger of the cold season, we turn to wolves. They are the enemy we love to hate, offering us a glimpse of feral intelligence. In the wolf we are offered a mirror of ourselves as we might be, without the comforts and constraints of civilisation.
• Life never does quite offer us those simple happy endings. Marianne’s story has a bittersweet ending. She put her head down and gradually chipped away at her debt, and was able to pay it off after three years, following an unexpected windfall. But the years of worry have taken their toll on her mental health, and now, after several missteps and a redundancy, she has accepted a pay cut to get a simpler job, which is as much as she can cope with…Marianne may not be able to see immediate relief in her future, but to me, she has achieved something extraordinary, which is to be able to talk about her wolfish leanings without feeling shame. And nor should she.
• Perhaps the wolf is such an enduring motif of hunger because we see in them a reflection of our own selves in lean times. In winter, those hungers become especially fierce.

February

Snow

• A snow day is a wild day, a spontaneous holiday when all the tables are turned
• The white witch in Narnia carries a suggestion of Christmas: the sweets and food, the promise of gifts, but also the way that it forces children to dance with their own greed for a season, encouraged to desire worldly goods, but also scolded for wanting them too much, and with too much alacrity
• She is the adult half of Christmas, perceived through a child’s eyes, that slightly bitter edge which they can’t help but notice as the grown-ups lecture them on the need to modify their demands
• In children’s literature, snowfall is the trigger for tables to turn. It creates a moment in which the usual adult protectors are easily incapacitated, and introduces a world in which children are agile and wild enough to survive.
• The snow was doing nothing now, except making our lives more difficult. “I want the snow to end”, said Bert. “Yes”, I said. “A couple of days was plenty.”
• Päivi says of life back in Hamina (Finland), “When the snow comes, it’s actually a bit of a relief at first. With the short days, everything is so dark. And then snow falls, and it’s like someone’s turned on the lights.”
• My tendency to think of snow as a bit of light relief is a privilage. To those who live with it, snow is plain hard work

Cold Water

• Gazing back at the water, I had the urge to do it all over again, to go back and exist in those few, crystalline secons in the intense cold
• For Dorte, who received a diagnosis of bipolar, it was the first time someone had ever said to her: you need to live a life that you can cope with, not the one that other people want. Just do one thing a day. No more than two social events in a week. Her doctor said, “This isn’t about you getting fixed…it’s about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have”. She was free from the decade-long wait for the medication to mend her. The pivotal change came when she stopped believing it could.
• When I’m in the water, I’m just laughing and laughing. All my automatic thoughts switch off, and I’m just in the water.
• We are completely enchanted by our own bravery, by the way that we’ve stepped out of the everyday world and into this alternative space. The cold sea, hovering between 5 and 6 degrees Celcius.
• I, who generally prefer to do everything alone if I can possibly help it, came to see how this was only made possible by a contract between us. The fear of stepping into the water – of even getting to the beach in the first place – never subsided, but having a partner in crime made it harder to avoid.

March

This part opens with a reflection on Aesop’s fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper – During the summer, the ants diligently gather and store food for the winter, while the grasshopper spends his time singing and playing, believing there’s no need to worry about the future. When winter arrives, the grasshopper, starving and cold, begs the ants for food. The ants, having prepared for the harsh season, rebuke him for his laziness and refuse to share, teaching a lesson about the importance of hard work, planning, and responsibility.

Survival

• The truth is, we all have ant years and grasshopper years; years when we are able to prepare and save, and years where we need a little extra help.
• Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up enough resources to cope with the grasshopper years, but in believing that each grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings
• When you think about bees, don’t treat them as individuals. A colony of bees is a single superorganism. They act as one.
• In a mere slip of the pen, I could fall into the tired old trope: the bees are models of industry. Be more like the bees.
• Mussolini was fond of evoking the beehive to describe the ideal functioning of Fascism
• Let us not aspire to be like ants and bees. Humans are not eusocial; we are not nameless units in a superorganism, mere cells that are expendable when we aave reached the end of our useful lives.
• We are not consistently useful to the world at large. Some of us make highly visible, elaborate contributions to the whole; some of us are part of the ticking mechanics of the world, the incremental wealth of small gestures
• Usefulness, in itself, is a useless concept when it comes to humans. I don’t think we were ever meant to think about others in terms of their use to us. We channel our adoration towards the most helpless citizens of all – babies and children – for reasons that have nothing to do with their future utility. We flourish on caring, on doling out love. It’s how we thrive. Our winters are social glue.

Song

• The works of winter are more intricate than the simple storing up of supplies, which are then run down until the summer replenishes them.
• Winter is a time for the quiet arts of making
• A robin sings in winter because it can, and it wants the world – or at least the female robins – to know it. But he is also practicing for happier times.
• My voice had waned alongside my confidence, and asserting it again was like asserting my rightful part in the adult world. I was gabbling out my words because I felt I had to get them in before I was interrupted
• Women’s voices are always contested in a way that men’s never are. If we speak too softly, we are treated as gentle mice, if we raise our voices to be heard, we are shrill
• Within four lessons, I had remapped my voice, bringing it lower and louder and softer and slower.
• In twenty-first-century Britain, we’ve linked singing with talent, and we’ve got that fundamentally wrong. The right to sing is an absolute, regardless of how it sounds to the outside world. We sing because we must.

Epilogue

• Change will not stop happening. The only part we can control is our response
• The subtext of the endless Facebook memes with unsolicited advice on how to cope with a crisis (hang on in there! you got this! you are stronger than you know!) is clear: misery is not an option. While we may no longer see depression as a failure, we expect you to spin it into something meaningful pretty quick…This is the opposite of caring.
• I am beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt.
• At its base, this is not a book about beauty, but about reality. It is about noticing what’s going on, and living it. That’s what the natural world does: it carries on surviving. Not just once in the hope it will one day get things right once and for all. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever.
• To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. To imagine our lives as cylical rather than linear.
• Every time we winter, we develop a new knowledge about how to go back into the world. You know, we learn about our tastes and preferences. We learn about what makes us happy.

What Did You Think of Wintering?

Drop your thoughts below and I will use it for our community review. Join the conversation in our forum and watch the replay of our Zoom discussion.

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