A Book Review: 'Wintering' by Katherine May

I read the book, ‘Wintering’ by Katherine May actually last year but felt apropos to share again this Winter season in this weird ass time of life. And to be honest, I might read it again.

The full title of the book is actually: ‘Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times’. As if I need to share more, the title alone made me buy this book immediately to read all the pages and have as a reminder on my bookshelf at all times.

What I loved the most about this book was the perspective of wintering as a verb, an actual action we can take with cues from nature in relation to our own human nature. Let me share with you May’s definition below:

“If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear 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. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”

I could end the blog now.

But I won’t.

Detour with me and then back to the book: I have not shared this journey out loud or often and I don’t know why, I have zero to hide. So last year I dabbled in micro-dosing mushrooms (two great books for anyone to read, as I know you will ask, is Michael Pollen’s ‘How to Change Your Mind’ and ‘A Really Good Day’ by Ayelet Waldman) - and by dabbled I committed for about a year. And I really loved the experience. Most notable: I loved the nod to the ability to re-wire the brain, I found I slowed way down in all areas of my life and really embraced the rest journey (cue my rest coach, Margaret James), I could not stay on a computer screen for more than 2 hours as my body literally said ‘go outside now’ at the 120 minute buzzer on the daily, and I laughed more and gripped my asshole way less, which I must say I really enjoy doing.

And why I share that is because through partnering up with nature in the form of a psychedelic mushroom (in my experience), I embraced all of the nature within me and around me. All of the experiences of living as a cycle, both as a human on a menstrual cycle as well as a human who cycles through sadness, happiness, joy and grief - just like the seasons we experience.

Let me share another favorite quote from May speaking to cycles of living:

“To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it’s happened before. The things we put behind us will often come around again. The things that trouble us now will often come around again. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. In the meantime, we can deal only with what’s in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the line, that next action will feel joyful again.”

Through storytelling in the form of chapters, Katherine May takes on a journey of her own examples of Wintering and I appreciate the detail to truly connect and integrate the definition of Wintering and say ‘oh hey, me too’ while reading it. I highly highly recommend this read.

Let me know if you love it, what was your greatest takeaway. There are so many good notes - last one to share before you go read it (perhaps again) with me: “Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.”