You're listening to How to Be a Better Human.

I am your host, Chris Duffy.

All of us experience winter.

Now you might be saying, Chris, don't you live in Los Angeles, a part of Southern California

that famously does not really experience winter?

And to that I would say you are technically correct if we're talking about purely a meteorological winter.

I haven't pulled out a winter coat or seen snow falling on my house since I moved here.

That's true.

Often in January in LA, I see someone wearing a heavy sweater on the street and then right

next to them, someone wearing just shorts and a tank top.

So, you know, winter is not always just a temperature.

Sometimes winter can be a

state of mind. And I'm joking about that, but I'm also not joking because winter really is

an emotional season. It can be a state of experience. And what we're going to talk about on the show

today is that metaphorical winter. Because our guest is the brilliant writer Catherine May,

author of Wintering, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. To frame our conversation,

to talk about these metaphorical winters, the dark periods in our life that all of us will go

through. Here is Catherine reading a passage from her book. Everybody winters at one time or another. Some

winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It's a fallow period in life

when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress or

cast into the role of an outsider.

Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child.

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