Book review: Wintering by Katherine May

“Over and again, we find that winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit. Yet still we refuse them. The work of the cold season is to learn to welcome them.” - Katherine May

I’m slowly emerging from a personal winter. It’s possible my winter may have looked like summer to those peering in from the outside. A business, two babies, a beautiful marriage, and a mortgage: my life is flourishing, abundant. And yet, my inner world has been through a cooling of sorts. A maturing, perhaps. 

The optimism and idealism that propelled me through my teens and twenties fell away as I approached a new decade, a new season. Slowly, like a deciduous tree shedding its leaves, I stopped believing in things I once knew to be true. Certainties were replaced with questions. There were times where my sense of self felt barren and bare, like a naked tree against a bright blue winter’s sky.

People say hindsight is a beautiful thing, but I also find hindsight to be tinged with regret. It’s easy to look back and realise all the ways you could have done things better, moved through the world with more grace, or listened to the siren calls of your heart a little sooner. 

If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself something like this: “It’s okay to retreat for a while. It’s okay to rest. It’s okay to not know the answers. It’s okay to just be.”

But, as Katherine May so beautifully articulates in Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, we’ve lost touch with the art of embracing winter. We run from it, often at full speed, seeking an endless summer. We resist winter’s invitation to rest and then reemerge. 

“This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. 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

I resisted my personal winter with everything I had. Looking back, I believe winter first extended its healing hand after the birth of my first child, a natural time in a woman’s life to hunker down. I swatted it away with grand ambitions of growing my business, planning the wedding of a lifetime, and living up to my dreams of being a woman always in full bloom.

Winter once again reached out to me following the birth of my second child, and this time I at least looked it in the eye. I slowed down, I stayed close to home, I made my life feel as small and safe as possible. But all the while, I raged inside. It’s not meant to be like this, I thought. I’m meant to be doing more, achieving more, living more. My son’s deep blue eyes told me everything was going to be okay, told me I was exactly where I needed to be, but still I thrashed and fought against surrendering to a simpler season. I wanted it all at exactly the same time: motherhood, professional success, thriving relationships, intellectual excitement. 

“There were times, in those early years, when I thought that nobody would ever listen to me again: that anything important I had to say was now crushed under the weight of the bag on my shoulder, full of nappies and snacks and wipes and changes of clothes.” - Katherine May

In a season where I needed to go gently gently, I instead read books on climate change and tried to go vegan. I attempted to abolish single-use plastics from my home and live without a car. Noble pursuits, but my timing was utterly off. At the very time when my soul was urging me to do as little as possible, I tried to do more than I’d ever done before. Motherhood would not slow me down. I was unstoppable.

“Life is clearly teaching me some kind of lesson, but I can’t decipher it yet. I’m worried that it’s about doing less, about staying home and giving up on adventures for a while. That’s not something I want to learn.” - Katherine May

But winter did not care for my summery ambitions. It didn’t give a hoot about my plans for spring. I pushed myself and I pushed my relationships to the brink, and still winter extended its healing hand. I wish I could tell you I surrendered to winter with grace and ease. It’s more accurate to say I collapsed inward, utterly spent, and let my valiant attempts to bloom fall to the ground. 

Here’s the thing about letting go: you really do feel lighter. I had no answers, I was still terrified about climate change, I had days where I barely recognised myself in the mirror. And yet, I no longer felt any pressure to be anyone other than who I was in each moment. I tried to be instead of do and slowly (oh so slowly) I began to breathe again.

In the midst of all this, lockdown struck, and even though it was hard and exhausting, I felt like I could surrender to what was happening. I baked comfort food, I let my preschooler watch a lot of television, I let my house cleaning standards drop to embarrassingly low levels, and I cut myself and everyone around me lots and lots of slack. And we were content. Tired, yes. Scared, yes. But content. Safe. Cocooned. 

“Sometimes, the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one: we need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on in there; that sometimes, everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it, and to be kind. To find our own grit, in our own time.” - Katherine May

I started reading Wintering in who-knows-what-week of lockdown, and it felt like coming home. A memoir of Katherine May’s own winter, it made me feel less alone in my slow, snowy season. It helped me understand the significance of rest and retreat, instead of worrying about what I might be missing. I only wished I’d discovered it sooner. Then I might have allowed myself to surrender to winter’s call when it first came. I would have recognised the call for what it was – an opportunity to care for myself and emerge stronger. 

“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is too… As adults, we often have to learn the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need.” - Katherine May

Wintering is a beautiful book. Katherine May is a supremely talented writer. Reading her words before bedtime felt like being lulled to sleep. I’d dream of crackling fires, cozy libraries, and the cool pebblestones of a grey beach on a cold winter’s day. Her words would still be echoing throughout my mind as I woke each morning. If I had to describe Wintering in one word, I’d choose soothing. Like a steaming mug of tea after a brisk walk in the cold. 

But Katherine May is quick to point out that wintering is less about beauty (although that is abundant), but more about surrendering to what is instead of what could be. 

“At its base, this book is not a book about beauty, but about reality. It is about noticing what’s going on, and living it.” 

As soon as I noticed what was going on for me – exhaustion, overwhelm, cynicism, confusion – I found a way to first make peace with it, and then move through it, and eventually, beyond it. I hope to carry a little piece of winter with me from now on: to keep close the clarity of the cold.