Wintering

I'll probably post next week sometime about books this year and reading in general, but today I want to recommend a book that I recently finished. It's called Wintering by Katherine May. I know that several of you are already reading it, but it struck me as so appropriate for this year and this time of year that I'd like to tell you a little bit about it in case it's not already on your radar.

We've had our first significant snowfall and temperatures have been in the single digits overnight, so this seems like a most appropriate time to read Wintering. The US subtitle of Katherine May's unique book, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times shows that this book is appropriate for readers living in any sort of climate as we are all living in Very Difficult Times. May defines winter as "a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider." It is a lucky person who has not experienced this, and in this book, the author recounts her own personal winters and what she did to actively accept the sadness. Cooking, bathing in the Blue Lagoon in Reykjavik, reading by candlelight, using the sauna, exploring the behaviors of bees in cold weather, and experiencing the winter solstice at Stonehenge are all things that May describes both seriously and with humor, in beautiful language.

I was prepared to not like this book as I thought it might be self-indulgent and privileged, but I did not find it so. For me, it was a hard-to-classify combination of memoir, nature writing, and philosophy, and well worth reading, especially with May's sublime writing. The subtitle for the UK version may be even better: How I Learned to Flourish When Life Became Frozen. The author says that "Happiness is the greatest skill we'll ever learn," but she understands that it is also important to learn about "the active acceptance of sadness." 

I fell completely under the spell of the author's beautiful words and finished this short book (250 pgs, ~ seven hrs in audio) in a day. I count myself as lucky when I stumble upon the right book at the right time, and Wintering was certainly that for me. Katherine May has written other books, both fiction and non-fiction, that I think I may search out in the coming year. She also has a podcast called The Wintering Sessions in which she speaks with other writers about the winters in their lives. I haven't listened to all of them, but the link is on her website if this might be of interest to you. 

I hope this season of winter, solstice, and restrained holidays is a time of rest and renewal for you.