A review by overbookedmama
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

hopeful reflective slow-paced

3.5

 This was the perfect book to begin a new year with. May looks at winter as periods in life where struggle exists. Where she excels is her vignettes of nature. I enjoyed her beautiful reflections on difficult times in her life and how she weathered those seasons with grace.

Notable quotes: 
“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” 

“That’s what you learn in winter: there is a past, a present, and a future. There is a time after the aftermath.” 

“In the cold, I find I can think straight; the air feels clean and uncluttered.” 

“The starkness of winter can reveal colours we would otherwise miss. I once watched a fox cross a frosty field, her coat shining against the gloom. Walking in the bare winter woodland, I am surrounded by astonishing foxy reds.” 

“Sleeping is my sanity, my luxury, my addiction.” 

“Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness—one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights.” 

“Happiness is our potential, the product of a mind that’s allowed to think as it needs to, that has enough of what it requires, that is free of the terrible weight of bullying and humiliation.” 

“In the wolf, we are offered a mirror of ourselves as we might be, without the comforts and constraints of civilisation.”
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