Wintering at Home: The Power of Rest & Ritual, with Katherine May

0:00Try having lamps instead of a pendant light. See if that helps you. Try walking about in the dark. I find it delightful personally. it's yours um you are allowed to make your home the place that welcomes you personally as opposed to a place that looks good to the outside world i think at particular low points true introverts and a lot of neurodivergent people really really just need their own company and just cannot take any more stimulation i think it's about having permission to retreat sooner than perhaps other people would. To me, like a home is an extension of a body and your body should feel at home in it.

0:42And that's not only visual, but it's about all of the senses. It's about the way it smells. It's about the way it feels on your skin. It's about the way it sounds. Like let your home be an extension of your sensory realm.

1:03Hello and welcome to Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. This is the first episode in a new strand of the podcast. Conversations with thinkers and experts whose work helps us understand the true meaning of home, beyond the bricks and mortar. My guest today is the writer Catherine May. Catherine's best known for her best-selling book Wintering, which explores the importance of rest and retreat during the fallow periods of life that we all experience. In this conversation we talk about what happens when we allow ourselves to notice natural rhythms and cycles, so the solstices, the shifting light and the subtle signals that tell us when it's time to slow down.

1:43We discuss home as a sensory environment, almost as an extension of the body itself, and how the spaces we live in can either soothe the nervous system or quietly overwhelm it. We also talk about boredom and creativity, and why giving children unstructured time and space can be one of the most generous things we do for them. Catherine helps us understand the home as a place where we can learn to restore ourselves, enabling us to go back out into the world with renewed strength. Here it is, and I hope you enjoy it.

2:21Catherine the first thing to say is I've I found your writing really inspiring I must say oh thank you I've always thought that home is such a great way into so many interesting themes that help you understand the world better and yourself better and I think of things like safety and comfort and routines and rituals and this idea of belonging you know do you belong to your community and so on and so forth. So today I suppose I'd love to talk to you about some of your ideas using the home specifically as a framework. So I think really with most of my guests I'd like to start at the beginning. So just kind of briefly, what was home like for you when you were younger and was it an important thing to you when you were young?

3:06Yeah I think so. I mean I had quite a divided sense of home when I was younger. I had spent from the age of I think four till I was eight or nine we lived with my grandparents after my parents divorce and although my mum hated moving back with her parents for obvious reasons I loved living with my grandparents and they kept a very kind of calm quiet very routine led house um which for me just felt so comforting and soothing um and when I think of home I still probably think most of their home honestly um but when I was eight or nine we moved into council housing um and I I really didn't enjoy that for the longest time.

4:01It was just a very run-down house. And my mum is incredibly house proud. She worked so hard to bring it up to standard. But for the first few years we were there, we were fighting kind of endless battles against leaks and things falling down and things breaking. And we had no heating. We had no double glazing. It was cold. It was quite uncomfortable. and I just wanted to move back with my grandparents, which, you know, I look back now and I feel really guilty for the number of times I said that to my mum, honestly. But, you know, again, like I was an undiagnosed autistic child, there was no way to really talk about how important it was for me to have a place of retreat from the outside world in a place that felt safe and predictable and fundamentally secure.

4:58And of course, it just took me a long time to process the change. So yeah, my childhood sense of home was quite disrupted, I think, ultimately. Okay. And what about as an adult? How does your home support you as an adult? And how important is it to you in your sort of everyday life? yeah it's massively important I mean I'm a homebody really I I do like going out she says very cautiously I do like going out into the outside world um but I find I find the outside world a lot you know I'm not comfortable in crowds I'm not comfortable in groups of people I get socially exhausted really quickly. And of course, I live with heightened sensory issues where, you know, so many things that feel normal to other people and completely fine, like fluorescent lighting or background music or just stuff that makes weird noises outdoors is overwhelming for me.

6:04and so I really I rely on my home to be able to come back into a space that feels right you know and that can reset me and I you know I I'd extend that to a visual sense as well like I I can get visual overwhelm quite often too and I think my home is carefully made to be in soothing colours, to absorb sound rather than reflect it, to just not be part of the chaos that I sometimes experience outside. Can you give me an example of that visual chaos, a kind of environment that you find difficult? Yeah, I mean, I find kind of untidiness quite hard. I find also like a lot of pattern quite hard for me personally.

7:00And sometimes it's just kind, it's hard to explain, but some places to me have too much light or too many different things going on or a lack of symmetry or a sense of general disorder. And I can't, I can't rest there. I can't manage it somehow it's quite hard to articulate really but I could point it you know point you to it when I see it um I was talking to an architect recently funnily enough we were both in this really loud cafe and I was like this is awful here and he has hearing loss and he was like well I'm finding it awful too and one of the things that I've noticed over the last few years is that we've developed buildings with harder and harder surfaces and we've stopped softening it.

7:51And actually it's become inhospitable to loads of different people, but it's just fallen out of fashion to fill buildings with soft surfaces. There are so many things like that that influence my experience of the outside. And it's out of my control. you know as many times as I can leave a restaurant because the music's too loud or can ask people to turn the sound down or can try and choose the right place it's home that is the place that I know will behave itself fundamentally and that won't make me more tired you know that will actually be restorative that's such a great way of putting it that will behave itself because I and I think yeah the word control is really key isn't it I I think you're exactly right.

8:39I'd go along with that as well. I think of restaurants a lot. You know, I think restaurants are very unthoughtfully designed a lot of the time. I think one of the things is that if you're in a couple, one of those people has to sit with their back to a very busy restaurant with the sound going on behind them, unexpected sound going on over their shoulder. That's incredibly difficult to navigate, I find. Just that's one small example, but try and just see everyone so everyone has a view into the room, I think, is quite a basic one. You talked about the soft, sound-absorbing materials, but another one, you know, we don't need so many hard surfaces.

9:19We don't need so many hard surfaces. Everything's so rattly now. And if you have any, because I also have Menyer's disease, which is like an inner ear problem, which means that sudden sound can be very, very uncomfortable for me and I can get like a lot of sound distortion. Being autistic means I have sound distortion anyway. So it is actually amazing to me how many places that are very comfortable to other people are very inhospitable to me. And I think there are some considerations that just could be made. You know, we pride ourselves in putting in wheelchair ramps and escalators between floors or whatever it is that helps people.

10:01but my problems are more based on simple things like just not being too loud it seems so fundamental to me and yet I get the sense that for some people like loud noise levels are comforting they maybe feel like a bit of a disguise or they maybe feel stimulating for me it's the opposite and I increasingly don't want to tolerate these environments that I used to think, okay, well, just brace yourself and get through it. Like I'm not interested in doing that anymore. So what do you do then? You just avoid them or do you end up turning down a lot of social engagements and things like that? Yeah, I do.

10:47And it's a shame, isn't it, really? I mean, if I'm invited to a party now, I mean, obviously like close friends and things like that I'll make the effort for, But often for work parties, I'll ask some really careful questions about where this is being hosted. And yeah, you just have to say no. I mean, I do try and gently feed back. I'm so sorry, this isn't an environment I can be comfortable in. I think that's good. But actually, I mean, just as an anecdote, I went to a Christmas party, a work Christmas party last year for writers. and as soon as I walked into the room I just I couldn't believe it they had a a loud kind of dance DJ filling the room and these were all quiet nerdy people who spend their day behind a desk like me and the music was so loud you couldn't hear anyone talk you couldn't have a conversation and I just it was a moment actually of sort of radical realization for me that we have got into weird habits of thinking what social life ought to be and we seem to have got set in them when we were like 19 and wanted to get off with someone um and and actually not always successfully no we tried we failed it was glorious we did our best but actually there's a maturing that needs to happen I think in our generation we're both the same age about realizing that we are allowed to back down on like being at a disco all the time there are other ways to socialize and it just welcomes so many more people in I think I think yeah I think that's exactly right I had a really fascinating discussion with Chris Packham who explained how how difficult he finds certain environments but he he was great actually he sort of said you know that you sort of implied you have to be quite assertive it's a bit like you're saying it's fine to set the boundaries and say this doesn't work for me and I think people have to be accepting of that and that's okay I mean the great thing about being autistic is the bluntness that comes with it um and it and I think we do have to learn to say not just oh I'm sorry I can't make it which is the sort of polite mode of speech that we're trained into doing but actually I'm so sorry this is not a hospitable environment for me and I won't be able to handle it and I it still puts the choice in the hands of people if they want to change it or not but I do think it's important to voice that out loud actually yeah let's move on to wintering so you of course have a best-selling book all about this concept of wintering um to those who don't know what that means describe that concept for us a moment so wintering is a book about two things at once really um it's about how much i love winter and how that mode of survival that the world or the natural world goes into during winter is really beautiful to me and really fascinating and i just wanted to share that fascination particularly for the people who tell me that they hate winter and they just try and ignore it and get through it I wanted to make a case for actually living through winter as a positive part of the year.

14:12But it's also a metaphor for the times in our lives when we are frozen or shut out from the world. The downturns and the troughs that tend to be a kind of social secret, but which actually are a normal part of human life. and I wanted to put the two together and use it to speak about how ordinary it is with the scope of human life to have these periods and how actually as hard as they are and as brutal as they can be, essential they are to our learning and our growth and our ongoing survival. So yeah, it's a book that does two things at once. it's a very very beautiful book um I really I absolutely loved it how does the idea of wintering play out at home specifically can you give us some thoughts on that yeah I think winter's a time when we often feel quite confined to our homes or at least more connected than normal um for me there are huge things that we need to think about doing in our homes in winter to make them comfortable and cosy.

15:27I think it's really, really important to consider how we are looking after ourselves during that time. We should always try and get outdoors every day. It's really important. But realistically, we're going to spend a lot more time indoors. And so I talk a lot about things like food in winter, like controlling the levels of light and just really leaning into that hibernation space, metaphorical hibernation space, I should say, that our homes represent in winter and how vital they are to us as we take this long rest at the kind of pause in the year and how they can nurture us through that time. And what will you be doing this winter then, Catherine?

16:15Have you got specific wintering plans? And the problem is, before we start recording, you said the thing is this is now your time of year. You're known for it. So you're very busy, right? Yeah, that's right. It's so funny because I've always kind of burrowed in in winter and really enjoyed the extra solitude that it brings and really needed it. That feeling of restoration that I get when it feels like the world recedes for a while and that helps me, gives me the energy to come back next year. that has been a challenge for the last five years since wintering came out because everybody remembers I exist in September every year but I have got better I have to say at booking out my calendar very carefully and sort of managing my time but my family's at the end of a very gruelling year for us my husband's been very ill this year I've been looking after him and it's been it's been a tough year for everyone and I I really feel that we are ready to shut the doors on the world at this point actually this is not going to be a big party season for us um I think this year my winter home is going to be about helping everyone to feel restored again and really leaning into rest I think there's going to be lots of pajama days I think there's going to be lots of baking of cookies and you know enjoying quiet family time and I I feel like it's a sanctuary for us at the moment we're just enjoying our own company and needing it very much right now I understand that and you've got a son haven't you yes 13 13 year old.

17:59Yeah, that's right. Yeah. 13. Okay. There's a really lovely moment in wintering, actually, where you talk about baking gingerbread men with him and how that act somehow starts to restore you. And that's sort of what you're talking about, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, I know not everyone loves cooking, but I do. And I find there's something about those sort of unusual things that you cook the things that aren't the business of the everyday like gingerbread um they're a longer process they're a little bit fiddly they take up all of your attention and they produce something that feels special that feels kind of celebratory and like a treat and I I find things like that really restful and Bert and I have always cooked together that kind of thing funnily enough I cooked this morning some um molten marshmallow cookies for that for the very same reason um these lovely kind of chocolate cookies that you roll in a ball around a frozen marshmallow and then when you bake them the marshmallow melts in the middle they're aggressively sweet and I could not eat more than half but actually I was baking them as a gesture towards everybody else you know to sort of say okay we're we're really at the end of the year and here's this here's another little thing to to get us through and comfort us I'm big on comfort cooking I think.

19:23Yeah it's lovely isn't it? Do you manage to get outside every day? Is that important or some days not? Yeah I make a rule of it actually. I think there's lots of things about that. I think one is just moving your body and it's so easy to find that you haven't moved for weeks during winter if you're not careful. It's so easy to get put off by the weather. But also our circadian rhythms are linked to experiencing daylight and I think one of the reasons why lots of us feel that winter is so gruelling is because we forget to encounter that daylight and so our bodies don't reach that intrinsic understanding of where we are in the year.

20:02We've always experienced winter, we've always experienced the loss of light that it brings and our bodies actually know how to handle it but we have to let our bodies do that and there's a kind of discipline in even just stepping outside the front door every day and just breathing the air and seeing where the sun is and taking in what little vitamin d is available at this time of year um but yeah so i do i try and see the sea every day that's my that's my rule i live a like four or five minute walk away from the sea um and i i find it quite motivating instead of to say i'm going to go out to say i'm going to see the sea yeah so that's what i try and do yeah is is the sea important to you as a as a form of landscape though i mean does it Is it coincidence you lived by the sea or tell us about that?

20:51It's no coincidence at all. I grew up quite far down the coast or the coast of the river. I grew up in Gravesend. So there was always water and always that big horizon, actually, that you get over a river. But I always, always dreamed of living by the sea. And we moved here finally when I was 29, I think, after lots of persuasion with my husband, who is a Medway towns boy and very devoted to it, like this very urban landscape. I didn't think I'd ever persuade him, but he finally gave in. And I, yeah, the sea for me has a magical effect. It's hard to really explain it. And I know that not everybody feels it, but I always feel better if I can just get a glimpse of it and the smell of it I absolutely love and the sound of it it seems to completely reset me um and so yeah living here really matters to me I love it so we've talked about the idea of sort of hunkering down in these darker months I mean if you are someone that's naturally introverted or sensitive or you know as many words we can use but is there is some of them are euphemisms as well Some of them are, yeah.

22:08I suppose, you know, anyone listening will probably know what we mean by that. Is there a danger of those people spending too much time at home? And if so, what can we do about that, do you think? Yeah, it's difficult to say too much time, isn't it? Because I think it often, particularly for introverted people, it depends where they are in their life as well. You know, I think at particular low points, true introverts and a lot of neurodivergent people really, really just need their own company and just cannot take any more stimulation. But in ordinary times, I do think there's a balance to be struck, even for people like me, whose, you know, default mode is all of humanity is awful and I must escape it.

22:51I know I don't really mean that, but I do need my balance. And I think it's about having permission to retreat sooner than perhaps other people would. But I also think that that's where ritual comes in. That's where understanding the ritual year and taking part in it, rather than the social year, which is really, really different. And for me, switching into that mode, thinking about how I'm going to mark the solstice with other people to whom that's important, how I'm going to mark new year with people who are at my stage of life and, you know, with my kind of tendencies, which is not the fireworks and disco tendency, unfortunately.

23:41I'm married to someone with the fireworks and disco tendency, though, so that can prove complex. And I respect it in other people, but it is not for me. Yeah, for me, taking part in shared moments at key parts of the year that really means something to me helps me through that social landscape at this time of year and encourages me out even at times when I maybe am not predisposed to wanting to go out and I if it's the right kind of event I always feel better for it. That's really helpful I think let's talk about Enchantment which is your more recent book um just describe the sort of central ideas there and how does that relate to the home would you say yeah so enchantments a book about how we can find kind of awe and spiritual depth in every day um i wanted to write the book that came after wintering that answers that question like how do we go back into the world and find the magic of the world again after like a long dark period and And actually, I think enchantment answers a different question too, which is how do we find all that stuff within a long, dark period?

25:00It relates really powerfully to home because I didn't want to write a book that said that you could only find awe in distant, amazing, exotic places. that you can only reach once in a lifetime and that's your encounter, that's all you get. I wanted to write a book that said it's all here for you on your backdoor step every day but you actually need to train yourself to find it and that book is an exploration of all of the incredible array of elemental wonders that are right there under our feet and above our heads, the moon, the sea, stones, geology, landscape, the deeply storied landscape, all of those magical encounters that we can have that we miss because we don't think they're there and we don't think that we're the ones to encounter them.

26:04That's really beautiful. So is it about sort of paying better attention to what's around you? Is that part of it? Yeah, training your attention, learning to work with weak signals at first and kind of commit to them and grow them. It's also about knowledge, I think, in a way, and about how knowing things is a form of play, or certainly for me, and about how the quiet parts of the world, you can learn to hear them more intensely and find them really restorative. And I think the other thing it's about is permission to feel that even when the world feels very dark around us. I think that's possibly the most important thing at all, that we shouldn't defer this forever until everything feels okay, that these aren't just things for fluffy times.

26:55They're actually things for serious times because we need a toolkit almost to get us through. So I've never been able to meditate, right? I find that my mind struggles to be still in that way. But I did talk to a therapist a while back who said, you can do that kind of thing on the move. So she said, next time you go for a walk, you know, along the river near your house, don't put any headphones on, that's going to distract you. Listen to the sounds around you, look up into the trees, look at the sky, pay attention to the water as it flows, and just take some time to be still in that outside world.

27:40I thought that was a really great piece of advice. It's not actually a piece of advice I've taken into everyday life, but does that resonate with you? Yeah, that's great advice. I mean, oh, how long have you got on this, Matt? I could talk to you about this for ages. Go on, let's do it. Okay, I first learned to meditate when I was 29 and when I moved here to Whitstable because it came in the wake of a big episode of anxiety that had become, that had completely taken over my life. And I was unable to function because my anxiety had got so high. It wasn't the first time I'd suffered panic attacks, but it was a major incursion into my sense of like sanity, honestly.

28:28I felt like I was absolutely losing my mind. I didn't have a very good GP at the time. I think any decent GP might have prescribed me some medication, but mine sent me off with a flea in my ear. And I turned to a meditation class that I saw advertised in the library where I was hiding one day. And it genuinely changed my life. And I am also someone that cannot sit still. I'm someone who cannot stop thinking my brain is very busy and I had all those kinds of resistance to it but I learned this technique that I I had to commit to because I just didn't have any other choice and I learned transcendental meditation at the time after a few years I got frustrated with that because it's a very very specific technique and it you know it's very rigid I'm allowed to be rigid but I don't like people imposing their rigid on me so I worked with a brilliant meditation teacher called Lauren Roche who's he's actually from California he happened to be in the UK at the time and he talked to me about all of the different ways that you can get into meditation and I think he's the reason that I still meditate now and he watched me for a while and and bearing in mind this is before I had my autism diagnosis he watched me and he was like your personal space is absolutely enormous and you don't want me anywhere nearer than here and he stood at the other side of the road and he was like like watch me I'm going to cross into your boundary and you'll feel it and he was like five meters away and I felt it and he was like that's important to you that's not a mistake that's not a failure of yours that's how much personal space you need and he said and it's a meditation in itself to notice when people cross that boundary and I was like what that's been you know that's meditation um and then he said you move your hands all the time and so you can meditate by that that's a that's a clue that's a sign about how you are soothing your body now again like in the autism world, I'd now call that a stim.

30:49But I, A, I didn't have access to that language, but also not everything's a pathology. Some things are just how we soothe ourselves. And he was alert enough to watch me move my hands and say, try moving your hands until they want to fall still in the way that you want to. And I did. And so I've had the fortune of learning meditation from that perspective that there are multiple routes in and they're about tuning into what your body is craving at any one moment and letting those resolve themselves into stillness rather than forcing stillness onto yourself and that's why walking is a great way into meditation as well because I crave walking and it stills me but I have to let it and the advice to take your headphones off is a brilliant one because it's taking your attention in another direction for as long as you're listening to something else and it's about it's about sitting with the discomfort of your attention for a while and how scattered it is and staying with it until it calms and meditation good meditation because there's loads of bad meditation advice out there like Like, hey, everyone, clear your mind.

32:09It's like, oh, ta-da, my mind's clear. That's like the worst advice ever given to anyone. The way that I've learned meditation is to notice all of those thoughts and let them be, just let them be. And the effect that that has is it's a move towards stillness, but you have to process them first. You can't push them away. And there is no magic spell of clearing your mind, particularly for neurodivergent people who were like and yeah so I I never had to have that illusion that I was supposed to be still in the first place um and it's it's allowed me to stick with it so so interesting well thanks for sharing that I think that's really helpful and and is there just to continue that for a sec is there a are there certain things that you do each day in quite a deliberate way to get into that mindset?

33:07I mean, people think of meditation and it's, okay, I'm going to sit down somewhere and I'm going to be still for 10 minutes and I'm going to meditate. Is that what you're doing or how are you sort of starting the process each day? I let it be different every day and I let myself fail at it sometimes too. Like I'm not the perfect meditator. I don't do it every single day. I used to and since I have my son, I've never managed it every day. But I do different things that get me into that space. So sometimes that's swimming in the sea. Sometimes that's walking. Sometimes that is sitting in my chair.

33:44I mean, after years and years and years, it's now more like kind of tuning into a frequency than trying to figure out how to get there but that's that's years on um I try and make space for it and I try and give myself at least one minute just one minute of attention every day just standing out in the garden and if nothing else I've done that um so I've tried to let it teach me to be nice to myself and not to think about how it should be but instead meet my own need as it arises and sometimes that is definitely not stillness there's definitely like you know that energy in my muscles that says I I don't need to sit still I don't want to sit still I want to expend energy and sometimes there's that lovely call to sitting in silence and that's that's really beautiful when it comes but it's not consistent I'm not a monk I'm not a monk I wouldn't mind it actually I think Like, on balance, it might have been quite a cool career option, but I'm not.

34:54So there we go.

35:00You, I believe, got your diagnosis in your late 30s. Is that right? Have I got that right? Yeah, I think I realised when I was 39 and I was diagnosed when I was 40. So, yeah, on that cusp. Okay. Okay. Could you just describe, you talked about having panic attacks. You obviously had issues with anxiety at certain times in your life. Could you talk about how, did you feel like something was wrong with you? Did you feel like you were broken in some way? Did you feel like an outsider? I mean, it's hard to find the terminology, but how did you feel within yourself, especially as a child and into adolescence compared to the people around you?

35:42And how does that compare with how you feel about yourself now? Are we getting insights into you here, Matt, as well from that question? Well, we'll see. Yeah, I mean, I grew up feeling like a profoundly different kind of a person to the people around me. I literally thought I might be an alien. That was the way I thought about it when I was a child. that I couldn't even tell you what was so different, but it was like just not fitting into this social environment that seemed to know what it was doing. And the experience of being disliked, of people not taking to me, of somehow not managing to pull off this incredible social feat of just being in a classroom with other people and getting along.

36:40And I now look back on it and think that also I didn't understand them. Like it felt at the time like they didn't understand me, but I look back now and I think, you know, I didn't understand their emotional responses to things. Like in some ways, I was having a big response and nobody else was having one. You know, like being in a noisy room, that makes me want to kind of grab my head and scream and everyone else seemed happy. Like what's the dislocation there? And in other ways, they were moved or excited or upset by things that didn't bother me at all. You know, and I couldn't understand those differences.

37:21it felt like everybody else was kind of numb and I was feeling and I couldn't I just couldn't figure it out you know I dealt with a lot of the low self-esteem I dealt with the depression that so often comes with autism I had to deal with bouts of intense exhaustion that left me sick for months and months and months because of you know what I now understand as autistic burnout which is so common amongst people like me but which I didn't have any explanation for at the time and it's left me with PTSD around medicine because I was going to different doctors different clinics in pain in like like unable to sometimes get up out of bed and told over and over again that there's nothing wrong with you you know you're just and some people more aggressively than others yeah does that answer you does that fit with your experience I wonder no I mean it's often very different for boys right everyone's experiences are different aren't they and I A huge amount of what you said there is very familiar to me.

38:40I think that, strangely, I have never found the social aspect of it so challenging. For me, it's much more the sensory aspect. So things like, and I think we should come on to this now, but acoustics and light and the quality of space and materiality, which is why you know it's taken me a long time to figure this out but this is why where my intense interest in the built environment comes from because I'm hugely sensitive to all those things so I spend a lot of time trying to understand them and that's really what I'm trying to do with this podcast as well so I mean thinking about lighting for example how do you think about light in relation to your home both sort of natural light and artificial light are there certain things that you do or don't do?