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Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Writer's picture: Laura KauffmanLaura Kauffman


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.”― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

It wasn’t what she imagined. When she boarded the fishing boat in Tromsø, pregnant and seasick, she had neon-green expectations. The pictures of the aurora were vivid and ethereal, bolts of light hovering over the passengers’ upturned faces. She knew it was an impractical trip, being so pregnant, but sometimes you have to chase the light, even if it means traveling to the darkest places on Earth.


Katherine May’s book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, is one long boat ride toward the light. She reframes winter — a season most of us try to “get through” — as a brutal gift. She doesn’t minimize the cold or ignore the dark; instead, she mines them.

After plunging into the icy ocean, she and her friends scream and laugh around a seaside campfire. On St. Lucy’s Day, she sidles into a church pew to watch a processional of girls, all dressed in white, walk down the aisle with candles on their heads. She sleeps longer. She eats heartier. She survives and, somehow, makes it seem beautiful.


When the captain called her to the deck, she expected the aurora to dazzle. But it didn’t. Even when she squinted, she couldn’t tell if she was seeing the phenomenon or a figment. “Seeing [the aurora] is an uncertain experience, almost an act of faith,” she writes. “I honestly don’t think I would have spotted them at all if I’d not been told they were there.”


Wintering tells me that beauty is there; it helps me spot the light in the winter sky. Perhaps this season is a brutal magic — a call to extended sleep, gentle candlelight, and bracing walks in the woods. Perhaps winter invites us to pour a cup of tea, settle into the quiet, and meet God in the fallow season.


Perhaps winter is an act of faith.

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