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Krista Tippett: Hello. Welcome back.

In the middle of our semi-pandemic period, I threw a question out into the world, asking people who was helping them get through this time. And that’s how I learned about the existence of Katherine May and her book, Wintering. The notion of “wintering” that she writes about and explores so beautifully, with such nuance, gives us a frame for a lot of what we’ve been exploring in these sessions. It’s such an interesting frame, and spacious, for not just greeting but living with what we’re living through, in a threshold moment. This is a threshold moment.

Like the joy Drew Lanham musters and models and teaches, Katherine May’s notion of wintering really deeply observes a season of the natural world — takes the natural world as a teacher. She’s looking at how wintering is a place in our imaginations and psyches, how in so many stories and fables that shape us, cold and snow, the closing in of the light, these have deep psychological reality as much as they are about physical realities, and wintering also understood here as a recurrent weather pattern, echoing that language of Sharon Salzberg — a recurrent weather pattern in any life. And it can extend not just across days, but a passage of time, across Moments with a capital “m,” and doesn’t even necessarily happen in the literal season of winter.

Katherine May’s book Wintering begins on what she describes as “an unseasonably sunny day in September” just before her 40th birthday, when her husband fell suddenly very ill. Ever since I had this conversation with her, I have thought about this time in the life of the world as a season for our species — as one big, extended, communal experience of wintering.

Thinking of it that way really helps create space in what I’m seeing and looking for, and also what I’m trusting: that amidst upheaval and ongoing uncertainty there is also gestation — again, if we take the natural world as our teacher. Katherine May writes about how 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 summer. They perform acts of metamorphosis to get them through. She has this stunning sentence: “Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

Katherine May: “I’m beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savored. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery, that we should wallow in misery or shrink from doing everything we can to alleviate it, but I do think it’s instructive. After all, unhappiness has a function: it tells us that something is going wrong. […]

“Sometimes the best response to our howls of anguish is the honest one. We need friends who wince along with our pain, who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while, while we’re finding our feet again. We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves: To give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind. To find our own grit, in our own time.”

That paragraph is my editor’s favorite one, as well. That’s quite funny.

Tippett: Oh, it is, really?

May: Yes, she’ll be really pleased you chose that, I think.

I think we’re so uncomfortable with sadness. And our instinct, when someone tells us they’re sad, is to solve it for them or to find a message that’s going to inspire them. I think that can feel a lot like being pushed away. It can feel a lot like being told that our feelings aren’t acceptable and that our state of being isn’t acceptable. When we’re in this position, it’s more than a feeling — it’s a whole state of being. And it’s a skill that we can all learn, to say to people when they’re suffering, “Oh, God, that’s awful,” and make space for their sadness, open up a space that their sadness is acknowledged and validated. When we do that, it doesn’t cause harm. It doesn’t encourage them, somehow. It doesn’t …

Tippett: It doesn’t make it worse.

May: It doesn’t make it worse. And I think we’re often afraid of opening the door to it, because we see it as this unruly thing. But my belief is that it’s only unruly when it’s being pushed away and when we’re only ever allowed to glance it from the corner of our vision; that actually, when you make a space for your sadness to come into, it’s a known thing. It’s something that we actually can understand and that we can be with and work with. It’s not terrifying. What’s terrifying is the flinch away from it.

Tippett: This is my last question, and it’s a huge question, and so I’m not asking you to definitively address it. But just how would you start to think, through the life you’ve lived and the person you are — and informed by this thinking and writing, reflecting, you’ve been doing on wintering — how is this all evolving your sense of what it means to be human?

May: I think what it means to be human is to live a life that’s deeply cyclical. There isn’t one path, straight path through, and certainly not an uphill path that works its way to a summit where, I don’t know, someone puts a crown on our head, I’m not sure, and the angels sing. I don’t know. I’m not sure how we think that’s going to work. But actually, my understanding now, as I get older, of being human, is that my life is fundamentally cyclical — that everything repeats itself; that nothing lasts.

And that sounds very nihilistic, but I don’t think it is, actually. I think that if we can truly grasp and believe in how fleeting this life is, how delicate, how subject to powers beyond our control, that we can begin to set our minds to a better way of living within it that isn’t tormenting itself with trying to grasp onto things that cannot be grasped and trying to assert ourselves in places that that is completely meaningless to do. That, for me, is humanity.

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Tippett: The invitation here is in some sense cosmic, and it is cellular. And that is to set our sense of ourselves in a more spacious understanding of time, which is, in fact, the true nature of time, in a more spacious understanding of vitality — the true nature of vitality, the way the world actually works, which is always seasonal and cyclical. Our world of work and industry and organization is structured in a clockwork way, but that’s not how time works, and it’s not how change happens.

I come back again and again to her statement that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life, that we have to lay low sometimes, and give ourselves whatever restoration we can find. That is, in my world, a countercultural, non-intuitive statement, but it brings me back. It invites us back with relief, to the ground of reality — that reality that we are here to befriend. When I understand unhappiness as a place, a state of being along the spectrum of vitality, it helps.

I will also say that there’s a part of me, as soon as I make that statement, that is so painfully aware that, again, especially in this world we inhabit now, there are so many people unable to stop, to rest, recover — to winter. And this may be about the work they do or the fact that they are parents or the matter of survival. Depression, which is something distinct from this simple thing in life called unhappiness, is also a very dangerous place in our world.

I hold all of that together in awareness alongside this teaching, and that is all the more an invitation to be honest, to create space for ourselves to be honest, for others to be honest with us about their lives. It’s another place where Katherine May writes that 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.

This recalls me to that same compassion that I’m able to imagine, looking out at our very fraught world, knowing what’s going on inside everyone else’s nervous systems. And I also wonder if wintering together might be the conversations we could start — with strangers, with family members from whom we might feel estranged — as just an alternative, a reality-based alternative to the things that make us feel so far from each other right now, when there’s nothing we long for more than company and comfort and belonging.

“They are asking something of us,” our winterings, Katherine May writes. “We must learn to invite them in” and to stop wishing it were summer. We get to a point where we can ask ourselves, what is this winter about? What change is coming? And in the Pause, we are going to meditate on these things.

I will meet you next time.