“Sun is bright sky is clear, ocean calling you to swimm enjoy don't forget winter will come where you'll respect water and being friends of blankets, life is like that enjoy the moment remember the feature.”
“Nature shows that survival is a practice. Sometimes it flourishes---lays on flat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey---and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn't do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. It attends to this work each and every day. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans.
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 one day be past history. 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. But one things is certain: we will simply have new things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again.
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
“I don’t power on through, I don’t put up a facade, and I don’t keep it in. I take a couple of days off and look after myself until I’m well again. I go to the sea, make sure I’m getting some good nutrition, cancel all my appointments, and rest until I’m better. I know what to do.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere else is where ghosts live concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world, somewhere else exists at a delay so that you can’t quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already on the brink of somewhere else anyway.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“I was supposed to worry about his future qualifications more than his ability to be content. I was not willing to do that. I didn’t feel that the two should be in conflict achieving your potential and not being completely miserable.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“But if happiness is a skill than sadness is too. Pephaps through all those years at school or perhaps through other terrors we are taught to ignore it, 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 is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Every story begins as a whisper of truth waiting to find its voice.”
Source: Angel Numbers 101: Daily Guidance for a Higher Life
“I have cut out sugar, I make sure I get plenty of alone time, I go on long walks and I’ve stopped saying yes to everybody. I’ve cut down my working hours. All of these things make a buffer and I say I like to keep my buffer broad. Sometimes problems come up that narrow my buffer and then I have to make sure I build it up again. Keeping well is almost a full-time job but I have a wonderful life.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“As I walk, I remind myself of the words of Alan Watts: “To hold your breath is to lose your breath”. In the wisdom of insecurity what makes a case that always convinces me but which I always seem to forget that life is by nature uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security somehow and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless unpredictable change. That is the very essence of this life.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“Sometimes the best response to our house of anguish is the honest one: we need friends who winter along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom and who allow us to be weak for a while while we’re finding our feet again. We need people to acknowledge that we can’t always hang on in there. That sometimes everything breaks.”
Source: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times