The Blurb:
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, this is an intimate, revelatory exploration of the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.
Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.
A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.
Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.
The Afterglow:
I don't know where this book was in 2020 when I really needed it! I guess it was published in London and word just took a little while to get to the US. Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention to the right book outlets. Coincidentally, I was in one of the worst winters of my life, maybe the single worst winter. In February 2020, my only daughter died, less than 24 hours after she was born. I suffered an AFE on the operating table, and surviving that somehow made it even worse that my daughter died. Because how could life possibly go on?
Somehow it did, and I found myself in a milder winter, but a winter all the same. I'd just graduated in June 2024, and woke from my celebratory reveling to a period of underemployment, wondering with trepidation what came next. Katherine May's beautiful book about wintering well through our life's darkest, coldest hours touched me on a very deep level. I enjoyed the autobiographical elements, and the poetry in her prose. I enjoyed learning of the far reaches of the world, both geographical and metaphysical, which she brought closer through the page, inviting me into churches and ceremonies that were not my own, nor fully hers either. Somehow her intentional tourism, even in her own country, gave me new permission to soak it all in: the beauty, the weirdness, and the meaning in everything human's do.
I recommend this book to those exploring the concept of hygge, or self-care, or if you're just going through something. It will help you see you're not alone, even though it really feels like it when you're in the thick of it.
Enjoy!
