Krista Tippett: The title of your book — of your newest book is Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. And I thought it might be interesting to ask you — because I started thinking about this, reading you — to cast your mind back to how were rest and retreat experiences you had in your childhood — or didn’t have — what did you learn about those things, either actively or from what you saw around you?

Katherine May: That’s a really interesting question. I’m not sure if I’d have thought about those things very much as a child, in a way. I had a very quiet childhood. I grew up in what we’d call a council estate. I think you guys would call it the projects or whatever — like a state-owned housing. And my mother was not very keen on leaving the house; she was agoraphobic. And I found my childhood very boring, actually. We were always stuck inside; I was always asking to go out to different places. And the only places we were really able to go to was to my grandparents’ house, which I loved, and to the supermarket on a Friday. That was the extent of the excitement. So actually, in lots of ways, it was enforced retreat for me, as a child. There wasn’t the opportunities that I wanted to have, to get out into the world and to see it, really.

Tippett: Was there at all a spiritual or religious tradition in that background of your childhood?

May: There was none at all. In fact, actually, there was almost the opposite of that; a kind of antipathy towards — not any particular religion, but also towards the idea of, I don’t know, ritual or belief or anything that was seen as a little bit too fancy.

But I went to church schools, and I was a member of the Brownies. I used to absolutely love going to church, funny enough. I loved the singing as much as anything else, but I really liked the sense of ritual and the sense of stuff happening. And by the time I was at university, I became a chorister — again, the only non-practicing-Christian chorister in the chapel choir — but actually, I loved that peaceful time in chapel three times a week, where we sang. So I suppose I’ve always been slightly drawn to it, but it’s certainly not part of my background, no.

Tippett: I do feel some of those impulses surface in this investigation you’ve done, in how you live — this idea of wintering. By which you’re talking about, all at once, certainly the season, the rhythms of the natural world, and the rhythms of the needs of our bodies; but also seasons and rhythms of a life. You do begin your book, Wintering, with the sentence, “Some winters happen in the sun.” And you begin with a blazing day in early September.

May: I thought that was really important, actually. I wanted to make it really clear that although a lot of Wintering is about my love of winter and my affection for the cold and even the dark, that wintering is a metaphor for those phases in our life when we feel frozen out or unable to make the next step, and that that can come at any time, in any season, in any weather; that it has nothing to do with the physical cold. So it was very useful from a narrative point of view, to be able to start with what indeed happened, which was an unseasonably sunny day in September just before my fortieth birthday, when my husband fell very suddenly ill.

Tippett: Here’s one way — I thought this was such a beautiful way of — one of the many places where you describe what you’re talking about, with wintering: “There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open you, and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. And Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on.”

May: That’s a key feature of enduring a wintering, I think, in that it feels like everybody else is carrying on as normal, and you’re the only one with this storm cloud over your head. And that’s a very particular feeling, because it brings up loads of emotions, I think; not just sadness, but also a sense of paranoia, a sense of humiliation, a sense that we’ve uniquely failed. And actually, whenever you start talking to people about your own winterings, they start telling you about theirs, and you realize what huge community there could be if we talked about this in a different way. But I think for all of my life, that experience has been a feeling of falling through the cracks, being there on your own, and looking up through those cracks at the world carrying on around you.

Tippett: I think that’s also where the framing of Wintering, of the understanding of the seasonal, cyclical, of the rhythmic nature of these things gives you a frame, actually, to live with it. There’s somewhere you said, “Our winterings” — as you said, not only to live with it, but to wrest from it what it can teach you. Not that you would wish for it or wish this thing for anything else, but, you said, “They are asking something of us,” our winterings. “We must learn to invite them in” and to stop wishing it were summer. But I think what you discovered, that is really the hardest thing to believe when you’re in the midst of that dark place, is that there is a summer on the other side of this; that there can be.

May: I think, almost, looking for summer is part of the problem: that summer is too much of a high for us to be seeking. Not that summer doesn’t come, but actually, when we’re in a winter, we almost need to look for spring or autumn, those kind of intermediate stages that are manageable for our dark imaginations at the time. And I don’t know if we ever really figure out how to think about how we want to be. I don’t think we want summer that often. I think summer can be a bit too much, in the way that winter can be a bit too much; those extreme highs. You can’t abide with them for too long.

But what we can abide with is a sense of balance and self-regulation, I suppose I’d say. And I think that’s often what we’re seeking, on our way out of a winter: How can I come back into an equilibrium, rather than keep bouncing between extremes?

Tippett: I’d love to hear you read a bit of your book. It really does read, in places, like a meditation. It’s a very lovely, restful, retreating experience.

May: No problem.

“A surprising cluster of novels and fairytales are set in the snow. Our knowledge of winter is a fragment of childhood, almost innate. All the careful preparations that animals make to endure the cold, foodless months; hibernation and migration, deciduous trees dropping leaves. This is no accident. The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive. Dormice laying on fat to hibernate, swallows navigating to South Africa, trees blazing out the final weeks of autumn. It is all very well to survive the abundant months of spring and summer, but in winter, we witness the full glory of nature’s flourishing in lean times.

“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 they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing 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.

“It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it’s essential. ”

Tippett: Thank you.

May: There were some really difficult words in there.

Tippett: Well, you did an excellent job. It was wonderful.

You call these the “unfashionable things.” It’s just like, even when you look at the individual words, some of those difficult words, like “recuperation,” “slow replenishment,” even “reflection,” there’s a sense in which everything in our culture — our cultures, both the culture you live in and the one I live in; the culture of the West, I think — inclines us to resist these things.

May: And to see rest and the need for rest as shameful, like rest is something that you only ever get forced into or that it has to be commodified, somehow, too — that rest can only be something that you’ve paid to do; a fancy retreat or a day at spa, or whatever it is that you fancy doing. And I think we’ve just got that all wrong. Rest should be part of the simple rhythm of our day and of our week and of our year, in different ways. I don’t think we know what rest even is anymore, to be honest. I think we’ve lost track of that.

Tippett: I really recognized myself in some of the ways you described the self that you were reflecting on as you were forced to stop, you were forced to go inward, you were forced to slow down and seek replenishment as much as survival as anything that would feel luxurious, as you say. And I have to say, I recognize in what you describe, also, reflection I’ve been doing, and would not have forced myself to this kind of stop, but that the pandemic forced. But I’m trying to take this wintering moment — both the season and in our culture — to try to get really clear, in myself, who I do want to be on the other side, how I want to live on the other side.

Again, I recognize myself so much: you say, “People admired me for how much I got done. I lapped it up, but felt secretly that I was only trying to keep pace with everyone else, and they seemed to be coping better.”

I felt like that all the time, for so many years of my life.

May: Are we just a big mesh of people that feel that way? I sometimes feel that’s probably the case, that we all suspect everyone else is doing it much better than we are.

Tippett: And we’re hiding it. We’re hiding it, and we’re all hiding it from each other, and so feeling more alone with it than we are.

May: It’s like our dirty secret.

Tippett: Dirty secret. And you also describe how you were actually, officially declared ill, and you had to take a break, from your doctor.

May: Yes — I was rubber-stamped.

Tippett: And you said — you’re pleased, slyly and secretly, that you have actual “pain to contend with, rather than a more nebulous sense of my overwhelm. See? I am not unable to manage my workload. I am legitimately ill.”

Again, that’s so familiar. It’s a way we’ve not only lived, but actually respected and honored. We have rewarded that way of living.

May: Like, I needed a doctor to approve my illness, in order to believe it myself. And that’s economic, obviously; I needed to know I had state guarantees behind my illness, should it carry on for too long. But it’s also the way we’ve bought into what health and illness actually are. And we’ve come to see that as something that‘s externally approved from our own knowledge and knowing. We’ve divorced ourselves from our gut instinct, actually, I think. If I felt I had the right to judge my own wellness, I’d have declared myself ill a year before that, and I would’ve taken a rest much earlier. But I didn’t feel like I had the right to decide it for myself, ultimately.