Waiting for Spring
I’ve been thinking lately about the importance of what Katherine May calls “wintering.”
In a conversation about her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, May tells Krista Tippett, “I wanted to make it really clear that, although a lot of Wintering is about my love of winter and my affection for the cold and even the dark, that wintering is a metaphor for those phases in our life when we feel frozen out or unable to make the next step, and that that can come at any time, in any season, in any weather, that it has nothing to do with the physical cold.”
May describes these periods of transition in life as moments to invite stillness and reflection. We must learn to invite our winterings in, she says. In the book, she writes,
“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 they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
February is a beautiful time to consider the metamorphosis each of us is undergoing as we wait to become new again. This month’s chill will make way for spring. Below are some quotes about embracing winter’s beauty while gently remembering the hope of the spring to come.
- “February is the border between winter and spring.” — Terri Guillemets
- “…I hear the sounds of melting snow outside my window every night and with the first faint scent of spring, I remember life exists…” — John Geddes
- "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." — Anne Bradstreet
- "The flowers of late winter and early spring occupy places in our hearts well out of proportion to their size." — Gertrude S. Wister
- “A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.” ― Francis of Assisi
- "Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle ... a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl. And the anticipation nurtures our dream." — Barbara Winkler
- "How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!" — Thomas Wentworth Higginson
- “You think winter will never end, and then, when you don’t expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light.” ― Wendell Berry
- "No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn." — Hal Borland