Reviews with content warning for Medical content - Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Reviews tagging 'Medical content'

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

16 reviews

shelfofunread's review

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challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

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myk_yeah's review against another edition

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hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

5.0

Simply amazing. This book soothed the parts of me that feel bad for feeling bad. May reflects on how it's okay to feel bad. Life does contain suffering. And that slowing down in the winter (whether it's a season of the earth or a season of your life) is natural.

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midwichtriffid's review against another edition

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challenging hopeful informative inspiring reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

5.0

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atamano's review against another edition

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hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.0

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experimentalaudioscene's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

3.5

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced

3.0

Objectively, this is not a fantastic book. It's significantly more memoir than self-help, and a rambling one at that. It starts out solid, introducing the concept of wintering as an emotional season, parallelling not necessarily correlating with the season in nature. She discusses what the season feels like, the symptoms, and a few very general thoughts about how to get through such seasons. Then she loses the main thread and talks about various vignettes of her life, from seeing the Northern Lights to her son's first blizzard, ending with an extended discussion of the benefits of swimming in ice water. I appreciated it because it gave a name and explanation to what I'm going through right now, but it's unfocused and doesn't provide much advice for what to do when you're in an emotional winter.

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krys_kilz's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.0

This book fell a little flat for me. The opening and closing chapters were the strongest, but the middle felt a bit scattered and redundant. It's also hard for me to read a middle class person emphasizing the importance of rest and retreat when that is not something that's truly available to the vast majority of people.

I did love May's emphasis on change being inevitable and her passages about how we try to hide and erase grief instead of tending to it. I also liked the exploration of how out of sync industrial society is with life - whether that's seasonal shifts, sleep patterns, or changes in daylight - and how connecting to folklore and creating new practices can offer a path towards making meaning.

There was an element of universalism that I did not like. I think it would be more accurate and appropriate for May to have spoken only from her own experience and cultural context rather than generalizing what life is like. Generalizations like that flatten and erase so many other experiences.

"...life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable...we should stop trying to finalize our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life."

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olivia_piepmeier's review against another edition

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hopeful inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.5

Just as I read Eat, Pray, Love at the perfect time, so was my reading of this book during my own wintering. It's an interesting mix of general non-fiction, memoir, and self-help focused on the season of winter but somewhat abstractly. While it was released in 2020, I'm sure if May had experienced the pandemic at the time of writing, it would be quite different but also...not really? Much of what she says in this feels applicable to pandemic life in a way that would have been helpful to encounter earlier in the pandemic. I think a lot of my enjoyment came from seeing myself in it. As a long time fan of winter-as-season, this helped me see some of the subconscious reasoning. It also helped me feel more secure in my desire and decision to pause and see what's next as I recover from challenging times.

It would be a nice book to start reading around November when the "threat" of winter feels a little dreadful but anyone that feels they might need a pause would find something in this.

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kelly_e's review against another edition

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hopeful reflective medium-paced

3.75

Title: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Author: Katherine May
Genre: Non Fiction Mental Health
Rating: 3.75
Pub Date: February 6, 2020

T H R E E • W O R D S

Comforting • Reflective • Poetic

📖 S Y N O P S I S
An intimate book exploring the ways in which we can care for our beings in the most difficult moments of our lives. Wintering is Katherine May's personal narrative of wintering and the power of rest and retreat. It explores the importance of reflection and replenishing and restoring and transforming during fallow times.

💭 T H O U G H T S

This memoir came highly recommended to me during a particularly difficult period in my life. It was a reminder of the importance of embracing the difficult seasons and taking care of myself. May writes with confidence throughout each of the essays presented. She offers personal reflections and thoughtful observations through beautiful writing. In essence she forms a philosophy around the power of shrinking our world when life presents moments of retreat. It's a quick read, which I found highly comforting and validating. Sometimes applying the idea of 'wintering' is harder said than done, but after reading this it's as though I was given permission to embrace this particular season in my life and the comfort of simply slowing down. Overall, a book to find solace in.

📚 R E C O M M E N D • T O
• anyone in a season of change
• readers with a strong connection to nature

🔖 F A V O U R I T E • Q U O T E S

"Plants and animals don't fight the winter, they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sigh, but that's where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible."

"And although it's easy to think of bees as summer beings, adapted to drifting around flowers on hot days, their whole year is oriented in the opposite direction. Most of a bee's activity is directed towards its colony surviving the winter. They spend half the year preparing for it and half the year living it. Every April they emerge from their hive and start all over again."

"As I walk, I remind myself of the words of Alan Watts: 'To hold you breath is to lose your breath.' In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Watts makes a case that always convinces me, but which I always seem to forget: that life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable. That we should stop trying to finalize our comfort and security, and instead find a radical acceptance of the endless, unpredictable change that is the very essence of this life. Our suffering, he says, come from the fight we put up against this fundamental truth. 'Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brace is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape."

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cath_collette's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.75

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