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

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,

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