Wintering : Reading a Book in Its Right Season

I bought Wintering last year, drawn to its promise of gentleness and permission to slow down. But when I tried to read it, I couldn’t. I started and stopped, set it aside, picked it up again—and failed each time. I didn’t have the patience or the quiet the book seemed to ask for.

José, however, read it. He told me he found it deeply useful, that it named things he was experiencing and helped him make sense of a difficult season. At the time, I noted that quietly, without quite understanding why the book resisted me while it welcomed him.

Wintering : Reading a Book in Its Right Season

This year, I returned to Wintering differently. I got hold of an audio copy and listened while I read. Something about hearing Katherine May’s words while following them on the page softened my resistance. The book finally opened itself to me—or perhaps I opened myself to it.

Wintering is about the seasons in our lives when things fall apart or slow down: illness, exhaustion, grief, change. The winters we don’t plan for and can’t power through. May writes about her own winter with honesty and restraint, showing how life contracts before it expands again. There is no rush to recovery here, no insistence on silver linings. Only an invitation to rest, to tend to what is fragile, and to trust the cycle.

What stayed with me most was the book’s reverence for small, sustaining rituals—lighting candles, marking seasonal shifts, being attentive to the body, letting the days be shorter and quieter. These are not presented as cures but as ways of staying present when endurance is the work.

Looking back, I think I know why I couldn’t read Wintering last year. I wasn’t ready to stop. I was still trying to move forward by effort alone, still believing that slowing down was optional. This year, after a long season of learning about limits—my own and those of the people I love—I was finally able to hear what the book was saying.

There is something deeply compassionate about Wintering. It reminds us that rest is not weakness, that withdrawal can be wise, and that not every season is meant for growth that can be measured or displayed. Some seasons are meant only for survival and care.

Wintering arrived for me in its own time. It taught me that readiness matters, and that sometimes a book, like healing, waits patiently until we are able to receive it.