Wintering.

Human decency again walks our land. Some of us have been hunkered down, trying to weather the suffering and outrage of the past several years, and now find ourselves in chaos as the pressure is released. It’s getting harder to bear the loneliness. And the brutal truth is, there will be more loss and desolation before this is over. Our main job continues to be: to stay alive and gentle with ourselves.

If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife. (Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times)