Welcome to our Book Review series – a space where yoga meets words.
From slow, thoughtful reads to books that gently challenge how we live, rest and move through the world, we’ll be sharing reflections from our teachers and community on the stories that have stayed with them. First up, Nikki Wilkins reviews Wintering by Katherine May – a beautifully quiet reminder that rest isn’t something to earn, but something to honour.
On my to-do list, nestled between “clean the bathroom” and “stop looking at phone”, is the word “REST”. When did rest become something we schedule? We resist this essential daily pause, whizzing task to task, complaining we have no time for ourselves. And when we have it, we don’t know how to relax. As a teacher of early morning yoga classes, I sometimes see you yawning in sun salutations, I hear you gently snoring through savasana. I see that we are all very, very tired. I am too.
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Katherine May’s Wintering has been on my bookshelf for ages. ”The power of rest and retreat in difficult times” it says on the cover. I sat on the edge of my bed and began to read, and guiltily binged the whole book across three cold November afternoons. Winter by its very nature is the time to stop. The days cloaked in darkness by 3pm, biting winds sweep across bare seemingly dormant trees. Squirrels put finishing touches to their winter refuges and busy little dormice seal up their nest doorways ready to snuggle in for the long sleep. Maybe we can take note from nature?
This beautifully written book guides us through winter, reminding us of the awe in small wonders of nature and how to reconnect, emphasising throughout, that winter is not just a cycle of weather but a season in our lives too. Darkness is not only a time of night, but also illness, loss and grief we experience.
How we live through these liminal phases is Wintering. “We who have wintered have learned some things. We sing it out like birds. We let our voices fill the air” says May.
This is the time to be softer and kinder with ourselves. We become quiet, retreat, we “care for and repair ourselves” without guilt, allowing ourselves this natural period of early evening hibernation. “What if”, May asks, “instead of seeing this time as a restriction of our freedom, we could embrace it and fully immerse in the natural ebbs and flows of winter life?” Not as something we wish for, but as something we choose to live differently, which is richly explored by May throughout the book.
She tells us: “There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can’t quite keep pace.” It’s when we fall gently through this gap and allow ourselves to feel at home that we are Wintering.
I felt better after Wintering, less frazzled and certainly less guilty – a welcomed side effect of rest. Read this book, preferably on a dark mid afternoon, with a duvet on the sofa, where the only thing you need to juggle is a big mug of hot tea and a chocolate biscuit.
Wintering is available now:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1846045991?tag=prhmarketing2552-21