Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times

‘The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.’

I experience a different kind of warmth: the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren’t the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond all joy to be bikini-ready, and tanned as an act of disguise.

Heat is a blunt instrument, but warmth is relative. We feel warmer for knowing that it’s freezing outside.

problem with ‘everything’ is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away.

I had no idea how much these quiet pleasures had retreated from my life while I was rushing around, and now I’m inviting them back in: still, rhythmic work with the hands, the kind of light concentration that allows you to dream, and the sense of a kindness done in the process.

I often turn to children’s books at times like these, when I’m yearning to escape into a world that is beautifully rendered and complex, and yet also soothingly familiar.

can’t help but feel that I let the stress run so far out of control that it has begun to eat away at me; that I should have asked for help sooner. But then stress is a shameful thing, a proclamation of my inability to cope. I am slyly pleased that I have pain to contend with, rather than a more nebulous sense of my own overwhelmedness. It feels mor

Somewhere in the middle of this catastrophe, a space opened up. There were hours spent driving from home to the hospital, from hospital to home; sitting by the side of H’s bed while he dozed; waiting in the canteen while the ward rounds took place. My days were simultaneously tense and slack: I was constantly required to be somewhere and awake and

anyway. At moments like this, sleep feels like falling; you sink into luxurious blackness only to jolt awake again, staring around at the darkness as if you might divine something in the grainy night. The only things I could find were my own fears: the unbearable fact of his suffering, and the terror of being left to survive without him.