Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

We changed our focus away from pushing through with normal life and towards making a new one. When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs.

I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important.

The dropping of leaves by deciduous trees is called abscission.

That I’m noticing these things only now that I’m physically unable to remedy them feels like the kind of exquisite torture devised by vengeful Greek gods.

rask.

Carol Ann Duffy’s most famous poem, “Prayer.”

The loose communities that we find in spiritual or religious gatherings were once entirely ordinary to us, but now it seems more radical to join them, a brazen challenge to the strictures of the nuclear family, the tendency to stick within tight friendship groups, the shrinking away from the awe-inspiring. Congregations are elastic, stretching to t

When I was talking to Hanne Mällinen-Scott, I noticed that she returned again and again to the sauna; it helped her to cope with the cold.

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 far better.