I feel like I have been jumping through hoops for both art and family. Our daughter, her husband and our grandson arrived this afternoon. It is a great relief that we all made it this far. Now we can relax and retreat. Our winter metamorphosis results from good meals, deep sleeps, conversations, fires and time spent shoulder to shoulder.
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, maximising 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.
–-Katherine May, from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times