Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black.

There are times in life when unforeseen circumstances like the death of a loved one, a sudden illness, the loss of a job,

or even a global pandemic can derail our lives. So how can we care for and repair ourselves when

life knocks us down? Our guest on this episode, Catherine May, has written a New York Times best-selling

book on that topic. It's called Wintering, the Power of Rest and Retreat

in Difficult Times. Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me.

Tell us more about what you mean by the term wintering and how you came to write the book.

Wintering is a term I've borrowed, borrowed really from the natural sciences to describe a process

that humans go through really commonly in our lives, but one that's hidden. And that's the

experience of falling through the cracks, I suppose, I'd say. So, I mean, that might happen because

we've had a big change in life, like a divorce or a bereavement.

It might come after a mental or physical illness.

It just might come when we're confronting huge change.

But what I say is, however it arrives, it's always really painful and a very difficult time.

But it's also a time when we undergo a transformation.

We kind of retreat from the world and we feel like we're actually quite forcibly cut off from it.

But in that period of retreat, we're able to reform ourselves and reformulate how we're going to

go back out into the world again. So in retrospect,

we often look back on it and see it as a very, very important time in our life. But at the time,

we maybe don't realize that. And I suppose I wanted to write a book about getting perspective on that

really, like understanding how normal it is to go through that, understanding how valuable it can be,

and just cracking open all the different elements of that experience by looking at how nature winters

...