61 Quotes by Katherine May

I’m feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can’t imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that’s not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone else to understand.

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.

I wonder if I am perhaps a little too beguiled by this, whether my sense of malaise is actually a lifestyle choice, an urge towards homely perfection to soothe the turmoil that until recently has lurked in my life.

But a prayer, at least, is something that happens silently, in secret. It is nothing that I have to advertise or discuss, and so I am able to be discreet about it, disingenuously hanging with the rationalists while I furtively seek the numinous. This urge towards ritual is something new and altogether more risky, because it makes my invisible devotions visible.

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. And my house – my beloved home – has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner, and I have been helpless in the face of it.

Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

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.