Excerpt from Wintering by Katherine May

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but
that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.

Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.

It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.

Katherine May is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster living in Whitstable, UK.

 

Reflection:

• What do you need to be warm?
• What does hibernation look like for you?
• In many ways, the year of online school, has been a prolonged winter. Were you able to winter well? If so, what has that looked like? If not, what is keeping you from the rest you need?
• What do you need to winter through this moment? What do you need to winter through the months ahead?
• The pressure we feel to produce and function under any condition is deeply tangled with capitalism and white supremacy. How might you view hibernation as a radical, anti-racist act?
• How can you protect the time you need to winter well when you face demands of work, school, and family needs?