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121 " ... we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again. "
― Katherine May , Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
122 " It feels good to be making something, even while my contribution to the world feels very small. It allows me to imagine I’m part machine, fluid and efficient. And while "
123 " As we so often find in ancient folklore, the Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter. "
124 " In moments of helplessness, I always seem to travel north. I have a kind of boreal wanderlust, an urge towards the top of the world where the ice intrudes. In the cold, I find I can think straight; the air feels clean and uncluttered. I have faith in the practicality of the north, its ability to prepare and endure, the peaks and troughs of its seasons. "
125 " I have a habit of spending a small fortune on industrial quantities of gin in which to douse windfalls of damsons, elderberries, or sloes. "
126 " But then, that’s what grief is—a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything. "
127 " By embracing winter, rather than trying to push it away, we have both found a way to keep going. "
128 " spend three days eating egg fried rice and spaghetti with butter, white toast and Marmite and bacon sandwiches. It’s the most counterintuitive diet I’ve ever followed, and it fills me with guilt and also makes me feel better than I have in months. The effect is almost instant: the bizarre sensation that I can straighten up again, that I can actually digest what I eat, that my energy has returned. "
129 " Winter "
130 " He was the first person to ever say that, and the effect was profound. "
131 " Schimbarea nu va inceta sa aiba loc. Singurul lucru pe care-l putem controla este reactia noastra. "
132 " I have been hunting down a mirror for myself, a representation of how I feel at this moment in time. A severed child caught between two worlds, not sure if I can believe in any solid future. It’s not exactly comforting to find it, but it’s certainly satisfying, like a shared moment of outrage or the pleasure of a sad film. "
133 " But in recent weeks, my happy hibernation has been disrupted. I’ve come to call it the “terrible threes”: the dark insomniac hours when my mind declares itself, fully fired, in the middle of the night. "
134 " It always happens at three a.m.: a long way past late, but too early to surrender and start the day. There, in the truest night, I lie in the dark and catastrophise. "
135 " I am reminded yet again of the quiet value of ritual in my life, and of the words of D. H. Lawrence: “We must get back into relation: vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe . . . We must once more practice the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last. "
136 " We should sometimes be grateful for the solitude of night, of a winter. They save us from displaying our worst selves to the waking world. "
137 " the cold has healing powers that I don’t yet come close to understanding. After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life? "
138 " Life goes on abundantly in winter - changes made here will usher us into future glories. "
139 " We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how. "
140 " The ego flares like a struck match: bright, blue, fleeting. I am thankful to be alone when this happens, to let it burn out in private. We should sometimes be grateful for the solitude of night, of a winter. They save us from displaying our worst selves to the waking world. "