Synopsis
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 the seasons, our winters and summers are the ebb and flow of life.
A moving personal narrative interwoven 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 title and the description interested me, so I wanted to read Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. I liked the beginning where she defines wintering as
Wintering is 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. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. (page 9)
She then goes on to say that this book is
about learning to recognise the process, engage with it mindfully, and even to cherish it. We may never choose to winter but, we can choose how. (page 12)
This was the start of a period in her life where she felt as though she had fallen through into ‘Somewhere Else’, just as dust shifts down between the floorboards, a lonely and painful place. It was the time when her husband suddenly became very ill during the celebrations for her fortieth birthday and told her he’d vomited. Her reaction was to think:
what a nuisance it was. We’d have to cut the day short and head back home, and then he’d probably have to sleep it off. He was clutching his middle, but that didn’t seem particularly troubling under the circumstances. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave, and it must have shown, because I have a very clear memory of the sudden shock when our friend – one of our oldest ones, known from schooldays – touched me on the shoulder and said, ‘Katherine, I think H is really ill.’ (pages 2-3)
She still didn’t think it was anything really serious. But they went home, he went to bed and two hours later he said he thought he needed to go to hospital. She took him, after leaving her son with neighbours, and went home after midnight when he still hadn’t been taken to a ward. The next morning she returned to find him screaming in agony and suddenly realised she could lose him.
Whilst he was still in hospital she noticed a grumbling pain along the right side of her abdomen which she thought was in sympathy with H’s appendicitis. But about a year later she admitted to her GP that she’d ignored all the major signs of bowel cancer. This shocked me and I was concerned to know more – she’d ignored it for a year! She was referred for urgent tests and signed off sick. Was it cancer? I was worried, but it was only many pages later, she revealed that a nurse eventually told her she ‘held within her a mass of spasms and inflammations, a wonderland of malabsorption.’ This was life-changing as it wouldn’t just go away – it involved a three day diet of low-fibre eating. I felt this was tucked away within information about other topics.
There are so many topics covered that it would be an extremely long post if I went into more detail! It is divided into chapters headed October through to March, covering different topics. But I found it rather disjointed and muddled, moving from one topic to the next and from one occasion to the next, but not in a chronological sequence. It’s a mix of memoir/self-help book, intermingled with her own personal issues, experiences and reminiscences.
She writes a bit about the Danish concept of hygge, which represents cosiness as a kind of mindful practice and homely comfort, but it is more than this as she broadens her scope to include such things as, visits to Iceland and Norway; Halloween, folklore, the starkness of winter, sleep, hibernation, night time waking , SAD, Stonehenge and druids, prayer, Christmas and New Year, pregnancy, wolves, snow, swimming at New Year in the sea at Whitstable, ants, bees, Sylvia Plath’s poem Wintering, robins, and losing her voice and singing, as well as others.
It wasn’t what I’d expected, but overall I enjoyed it, although I think it could really do with an index to guide the reader to the individual topics.
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