Krista Tippett: Reflect inside yourself, in your journaling, what memories or reactions that metaphor of “wintering” surfaces in you. Try it on as a lens for pondering that list Sharon asked you to write of everything that’s happened to you this year. And I wonder, if you could name — or perhaps have already begun to name, even to live into — those questions Katherine poses: What is this winter about? What change is coming?

Consider these words of Katherine May: “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.”