Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“didn’t matter, because I had given up on sleep anyway. Something had already shifted. 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 teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there. Winter had begun.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Some winters happen in the sun.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Half-apologetic, I started to build a different kind of a person: one who was rude sometimes and who didn’t always do the right thing, and whose big stupid heart made her endlessly seem to hurt, but also one who deserved to be here, because she now had something to give.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Change will not stop happening. The only part we can control is our response.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“hold your breath is to lose your breath.â€� 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Winter is a time for the quiet arts of making, for knitting and sewing, baking and simmering, repairing and restoring our homes.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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

“It is all very well to survive the abundant months of the spring and summer, but in winter, we witness the full glory of nature’s flourishing in lean times.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

“Wintering is a season in the cold. It is 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. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The greatest fear of the English is embarrassment.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I own nothing. I have nothing to show for my forty-odd years on this earth except for a pile of dusty books.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I, who had essentially liked the rhythm and challenge of school, came to realise how many people found school an utter endurance—yet many of them believed that our children should endure it, too, for fourteen painful years of their life.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“As John Cleese once said, the greatest fear of the English is embarrassment,”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed The speculating rooks at their nests cawed And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass, What we below could not see, Winter pass. Edward Thomas, “Thaw”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I have a kind of boreal wanderlust, an urge towards the top of the world where the ice intrudes. In the cold, I find I can think straight; the air feels clean and uncluttered. I have faith in the practicality of the north, its ability to prepare and endure, the peaks and troughs of its seasons. The warm weather destinations of the south seem unreal to me, its calendar too unchanging. I love the revolutions that winter brings.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“I’m soon interrupting to tell her my own story about being diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and finally realising that I couldn’t power my way out of it or find a therapy to fix me. The very permanence of the label—of having a brain that just happened to work in a certain way—was my salvation. I had to adapt. I had to surrender. The only thing breaking me was pretending to be like everyone else.”
― Katherine May, 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.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We, who have wintered, have learned some things. We sing it out like birds. We let our voices fill the air.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: what is this winter all about? I asked myself: what change is coming?”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Like the robin, we sometimes sing to show how strong we are, and we sometimes sing in hope of better times. We sing either way.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“We sing because it allows us to speak of love and loss, delight and desire, all encoded in lyrics that let us pretend that those feelings are not quite ours.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Women's voices are contested in a way that men's never are. If we speak too softly, we are treated as gentle mice; if we raise our voices to be heard, we are shrill.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Usefulness is a useless concept when it comes to humans. I don't think we were ever meant to think about others in terms of their use to us.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Humans are not eusocial - we are not nameless units in a superorganism or mere cells that are expendable when we have reached the end of our useful lives.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“The very permanence of the label - of having a brain that just happened to work in a certain way- was my salvation. I had to adapt. I had to surrender. The only thing breaking me was pretending to be like everyone else.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Nobody, had ever said to me, 'You need to live a life that you can cope with, not the one that other people want. Start saying no. Just do one thing a day. No more than two social events in a week.' I owe my life to him.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“This isn't about you getting fixed," he said. "This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times