“I gained something new: a welcome sense of insignificance amid a congregation of people; a lifting of the obligation to endlessly do, if just for an hour; a gentle truce with myself. I spent most of that time on the verge of tears. I needed to do no more than open up that tiny space to see how black it all was.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Druids follow the eightfold Wheel of the Year . . . which means that we have something to do every six weeks. It’s a useful period of time—you always have the next moment in sight. It creates a pattern through the year.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“I have always been that figure, reaching up towards impossible things. Today I am sick with those desires, trying to channel the infernal patience of parenthood while a dozen stories ball up in my throat, unable to be written. I’m scared that it might be forever, that one obstacle after another will prevent me from making the work I need to make in order to stay sane.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“I think again of . . . the way that snow draws you close to your family, forcing you to find moments of collective leisure in close quarters. The summer only disperses us. In winter, we find a shared language of comfort: candles, ice cream, coffee. Sauna. Fresh laundry.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“You must succeed, no matter what. Right now, people may ignore your story because of your current situation. But the moment your life starts to change, the same people will be eager to hear it”
“Gazing back at the water, I felt the urge to do it all over again, to go back and exist in those crystalline seconds of intense cold. My blood sparkled in my veins. I was certain that I could conquer it a second time around, could tolerate a little longer in that frozen claw. “That was brilliant,” I gasped.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“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, maximising 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.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Winter is when I reorganise my bookshelves and read all the books I acquired in the previous year and failed to actually read. It is also the time when I reread beloved novels, for the pleasure of reacquainting myself with old friends. In summer, I want big, splashy ideas and trashy page-turners, devoured while lounging in a garden chair or perching on one of the breakwaters on the beach. In winter, I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight—slow, spiritual reading, a reinforcement of the soul. Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“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.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our suffering, he says, comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times