Welcome back to 🌿🌙 THE EARTHY WRITER: My Rewilding Year 🐝✨
This is episode 17: “Wintering” or: Why Giving Yourself Permission to Rest Reaps Better Results. Recorded during the Full Cold Moon in Germany, this episode explores the often-overlooked power of rest and the wisdom we can find in winter’s natural rhythm of retreat and renewal. Join me as I share my personal experiment with embracing rest, guided by Katherine May’s “Wintering” and Kate Northrup’s “Do Less.” We’ll explore how stepping away from constant productivity can actually enhance our creative output and wellbeing.
In this Rewilding Episode, you’ll learn:
- Why rest is not the opposite of productivity, but its foundation
- How nature’s winter wisdom can transform our relationship with creative cycles
- The revolutionary “egg wisdom” principle and why doing less leads to better results
- Practical ways to incorporate deep rest into your creative practice
- Why these fallow periods are essential for transformation and growth
About your host:
Hi 👋, I’m Gisele Stein. I’m a novelist and a nature-lover, writing magical women’s fiction from my cosy cabin on Wadandi Boodja in Western Australia.
Episode Transcript:
Happy Full Moon, everyone. And welcome back to the podcast. I’m still travelling at the moment; I’m currently visiting my family in Germany for the holiday season. It’s been a while since I’ve last been here, especially during winter. And, knowing I was going to be in the Northern Hemisphere for the month of December, I picked my rewilding challenge accordingly:
For the last weeks, I have been challenging myself to do something that’s incredibly hard for me to do – and that is: To rest and – do less.
For this challenge, I had two fantastic companions: I read “Wintering” by Katherine May, and I listened to the audiobook of “Do Less” by Katherine Northup. These two books were absolutely fantastic; I have never taken so many notes while listening to an audiobook, and I basically underlined basically every second sentence of “Wintering”. And in this podcast episode, I will share with you:
- How you can make space for more rest in your life
- We’ll talk about the “egg wisdom” from Northup’s book “Do Less”, and why doing less might actually lead to better results
- And what my personal experience has been over the past weeks of resting and wintering, and what lessons we can find in those times in our lives when it seems to get really dark around us.
A disclaimer before we get started: I should add that I am a childless thirty-seven-year old, self-employed author. So, naturally, I don’t have to juggle the immense responsibility of keeping a mini-human alive. But, if you are self-employed, you might also know a thing or two about the pressure of never allowing yourself to rest because you are the only one steering this ship, and I feel that is something we don’t talk about enough, that “quitting your 9-to-5 actually doesn’t mean you work less – it often means you’re now working 24/7.
And something I’ve pondering while doing this challenge is that, we talk so much about “work-life balance”, about setting boundaries, about taking care of ourselves. But when it comes down to it, actually allowing ourselves to rest feels almost impossible. It’s like we’re caught in this loop where we know, theoretically, that rest is important, but we’ve completely forgotten how to do it, and to do it in a way that’s not for others to witness.
(And yes, I do realise the irony of publishing a podcast about resting without others watching)
But I noticed this especially in the past few weeks while I challenged myself to rest more:
The moment I try to slow down, this voice in my head starts up: “But what about that email you haven’t answered yet? Shouldn’t you be writing? Shouldn’t you be doing this or that?”
But the funny thing is – and this is something Katherine May talks about beautifully in “Wintering” – we’re actually the only species that fights against our natural need for rest and renewal. Trees don’t apologize for shedding their leaves. Bears don’t feel guilty about hibernating. Yet here we are, feeling like we need to justify every moment we’re not being “productive.”
And what I’m learning is that there’s a massive difference between taking breaks and truly resting.
Like, sometimes we think we’re resting when we’re scrolling through social media or answering emails from our couch instead of our desk. But that’s not truly rest. That’s just doing stuff in a slightly more comfortable position.
And I remembered something that one of my teachers did with us students during my safari guide training in South Africa: One afternoon, we went out for a bush walk and then, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, he sat us down underneath a tree and we spent the remainder of the afternoon just sitting there. No phones, no books, no conversation.
And maybe I understand only now how valuable and how special that was.
True rest is about allowing yourself to completely disconnect from the pressure of constantly producing, creating, or achieving. It’s about giving your mind the space to wander, to process, to just be.
And this is where both books really opened my eyes: There is this underlying pressure we put on ourselves, maybe especially when you’re a self-employed creative, to always be in “production mode” but this pressure is actually working – not for us — but against us. Kate Northrup talks about this fascinating concept called “egg wisdom” – but before I dive into that, I want to share something that really struck me in “Wintering.”
Our “winters” are these periods in our lives when everything seems to go dark – when we feel stuck, when we’re waiting, when nothing seems to be happening on the surface. And instead of fighting against these periods, she suggests we turn to mother nature and learn from her.
And this feels especially helpful to me at this moment, as I am currently waiting to hear back about two projects that are being considered by the traditional publishing industry. And I’ve been here before, and I will be back here again – because that is the game you sign up to play as an author. The publishing industry truly is one big fat lesson in patience.
But what winter, what nature, can teach us here is that, when it looks like nothing is happening on the surface? – That period of silence, of winter, of darkness, is actually an essential part of growth.
A seed doesn’t apologise for taking time in the dark soil before it sprouts. The earth doesn’t rush through winter to get to spring. There’s important work happening in these quiet, dark times – work we can’t see, but work that’s absolutely necessary for what comes next.
This really hit home for me because as a creative, I often feel this immense pressure to always be visibly producing something. To have something to show for my time.
But – and I know this, in theory — but creativity doesn’t work like that. Ideas need time to compost. Stories need time to ripen. And sometimes, the most productive thing we can do is literally nothing.
So, let me tell you what happened over these past few weeks when I finally gave myself permission to embrace this:
And I’ll be honest – at first, it felt terrifying.
Remember how I said this was something that was incredibly hard for me to do? I mean it. And so, the first few days of intentionally doing less really felt like trying to speak a language I’d forgotten. And I kept catching myself reaching for my phone, making to-do lists, feeling guilty for “wasting time…” Like, the hardest part was actually to not scroll on social media and to allow that nothingness, that silence.
…But after a few days or so something interesting started happening: When I stopped filling every moment with mindless productivity, when I actually allowed myself to take walks without listening to podcasts, to sit and watch the winter rain without the phone in my pocket, or reading those two books without so much as music playing in the background… my mind started doing this thing where it just wandered. And it was in that wandering, that new ideas started showing up. Not because I was forcing them, but because I was finally giving them space to emerge.
And here’s what really surprised me and what might be very, very hard to admit: The less I pushed myself to be productive, the more naturally productive I became. It’s like that paradox where the harder you try to fall asleep, the more awake you become. The moment you stop trying so hard, that’s when sleep finds you.
And this is where Kate Northrup’s concept of “egg wisdom” comes in, which has officially changed how I think about energy and output.
So, she uses this beautiful metaphor of how a woman’s body is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have, and how carefully these eggs are protected and released. We, as women are not build for constant production; we a re build for conservation, and for gradual release. And I’ve talked about this before: We are not meant to force are chase things – we are literally designed to attract instead. And this is especially true for creative work: It’s when we rest that the ideas come. It’s when we rest that things we have been waiting for finally fall into place, it’s when we let go that we signal to the Universe that we are ready to receive.
So this made me think about my own creative energy in a completely new way. Just like our bodies naturally know when to conserve and when to release energy, our creative lives have these same rhythms. But we’ve gotten so used to overriding these natural cycles, pushing through when we should be resting, forcing output when we should be gathering input.
And what I’ve learned during these past weeks of intentionally doing less is that rest isn’t the opposite of productivity – it’s actually the foundation of it. Just like winter isn’t the opposite of growth – it’s the season that makes growth possible.
Now, I want to be clear about something – doing less doesn’t mean doing nothing. Like, I still have to make sure I can pay my bills by the end of the month. But it means being much more intentional about where we put our energy.
It means trusting that not everything needs to happen right now. It means understanding that some seasons are for output, and others are for input. Or, as I always say, some years are for paddling, others are for riding the wave.
Some seasons are for visible growth, and others are for the root work – the kind that happens beneath the surface where no one else can see it.
What’s shocking, really, is how much resistance I felt to this concept at first. It feels almost rebellious to start the day not opening my laptop, but opening a book instead. Because here’s the thing about rest – it makes us vulnerable in a way that constant busyness doesn’t. When we slow down, when we get quiet, that’s when we start feeling all the things we’ve been too busy to feel.
But that’s also where the magic happens.
In these past weeks, I’ve noticed how my relationship with time has started to shift. Instead of seeing time as something to fill up, to maximise, to squeeze productivity out of, I’m learning to see it more like a, like a landscape I move through? And some parts are steep hillsides that require more energy, and others are gentle valleys where I can catch my breath.
And the more I practice this mindset, the more I notice how nature has been teaching us this lesson all along:
The trees outside my window right now aren’t trying to grow leaves in December. They’re not apologising for their bare branches. They’re simply doing what they need to do in this season – and that’s exactly what I’m learning to do, too.
So, let me share with you some practical things I’ve been experimenting with, and I want to acknowledge that what works for me might look different for you. But the point isn’t to follow these exactly, but to find your own rhythm of rest and productivity:
First, I’ve started paying attention to my natural energy patterns throughout the day. When am I naturally more alert? When does my creativity peak? When do I start feeling foggy? And instead of fighting these patterns, I’m learning to work with them. For example, I’ve noticed that forcing myself to write in the afternoon never produces anything good. So I’ve stopped trying and I’ll do my admin work in the afternoon instead.
Second, I’m practicing what I call “intentionally not finishing.” So, this means that I’ll deliberately leave things unfinished sometimes, letting ideas simmer, allowing projects to rest. This is a great tip if you’re a writer, actually: When you finish work for the day, you want to leave your manuscript, like, almost mid-sentence or mid-chapter, because it’s much easier to come back to a work-in-progress the next day instead of starting with that dreaded “blank page”.
Third, I’m redefining what counts as “productive time.” Watching the birds outside my window for twenty minutes? That’s productive, because it’s letting my mind process and integrate. Taking a shower without trying to solve plot problems? That’s productive – it’s giving my brain the space it needs to work things out on its own. Cooking a meal slowly, paying attention to each ingredient, without multitasking or rushing? That’s productive because it’s essentially a form of meditation that allows my thoughts to settle. Reading a novel purely for pleasure, without analysing the author’s craft? That’s productive too because it’s filling up my creative well.
But here’s what I think is most important: Learning to rest isn’t about following a set of rules. It’s about tuning in to what your mind and body are telling you they need.
And sometimes that means accepting that this particular day or week or month? Really isn’t going to be your most productive one – and that’s okay. Because just like nature needs winter to create spring, we need these quiet periods to create what comes next.
Lastly, I want to circle back to something Katherine May writes about in “Wintering” that really struck me. She talks about how these winter periods in our lives – whether they’re literal or metaphorical – aren’t something to “get through” or “survive.” They’re just another part of the cycle. They’re where transformation happens.
And that’s really what this challenge has taught me. Rest isn’t just the absence of work. It’s not just what happens when we’re too exhausted to keep going. Rest is active. Rest is necessary. Rest is productive in its own way.
So, as we move into this winter season, I want to invite you to experiment with your own relationship to rest. Maybe that means taking five minutes to just breathe between tasks. Maybe it means leaving your phone in another room for an hour. Maybe it means giving yourself permission to not be productive every single minute of every single day.
Because here’s what I know now: The world won’t fall apart when we slow down. Our creativity won’t disappear if we take a break. And sometimes, the most powerful thing we can do is absolutely nothing at all.
Thank you for listening, everyone.
On that note, do something wild this week, and I’ll meet you back here in January with my final challenge of this rewilding year.
Until then, bye bye.
Hi ♥️, I’m Gisele Stein, author of feel-good novels with a little magic and places like characters, which i craft from my cosy cabin on Wadandi Boodja in Western Australia. Have a look at my books here. I’m also podcasting as The Earthy Writer, to document my rewilding year: Every new moon, I set a new rewilding intention for the month, and every full moon I share my learnings with you…