Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

The sole role of the drones is to mate with the queen early in her life, after which time she stores millions of sperm in her body and uses this to lay around two thousand fertilised eggs per day. The workers carry out all the other tasks, working through a defined roster of roles at different stages in their lives.

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.

Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.

Beivve, their sun goddess, travels across the sky each day in a ring of reindeer antlers, casting fertility back down to earth.

Sometimes writing is a race against your own mind, as your hand labours to keep up with the tide of your thoughts, and I feel that most acutely at night, when there are no competing demands on my attention.

cyclical.

We’re urged to stop sweating the small stuff, yet we’re chronically anxious. I often wonder if these are just normal feelings that become monstrous when they’re denied.

That’s not fair! Life is more secure for some people than for others! But that doesn’t make his wisdom any less true.

“Rituals are the doorways of the psyche, between the sacred and the profane, between purity and dirt, beauty and ugliness, and an opening out of the ordinary into the extraordinary,” writes Jay Griffiths.