61 Quotes by Katherine May

Life has been busy, and in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of my identity have been squeezed out. I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way. What can you do when you’re already doing everything?

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. That we should stop trying to finalise our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our suffering, he says, comes from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth.

[On New Year’s Eve] we burn the Christmas tree (stripped and chopped up earlier) while H and I sip cheap champagne.

We passed fjords where people were swimming despite the unthinkable cold, and I began to absorb the connection between beauty and hardiness that existed in this freezing place, the way that these people worked hard to maintain their contract with the sublime.

I think again of . . . the way that snow draws you close to your family, forcing you to find moments of collective leisure in close quarters. The summer only disperses us. In winter, we find a shared language of comfort: candles, ice cream, coffee. Sauna. Fresh laundry.

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

Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.

Now my evenings have the consolation of mugs of emerald-green tea made with fresh mint. It’s not so bad, but the time seems to stretch, and I’m finding myself in bed by nine, perhaps earlier if I can get away with it. It’s a profoundly unsociable way of living, but it gives me those clearheaded early mornings in the inky dark, when I light candles around the house and relish two straight hours when nobody can make any demands on me.

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.