Stillness 2-6: I’m amazed at and impressed by my friends who love winter. They say things like, “I can work on projects I wasn’t able to the rest of the year.” “I love the cold.” “I love the snow – it’s so beautiful.”
Wow.
By the time February rolls around I am so deep into a timeless, zoneless well of bleakness I’m no longer even able to count the days till spring. I’m frozen. When I was in my twenties during winters I used to work like a zombie in a windowless corporate cubicle, then get in a subway, be in my apartment after dark, never see the sky, and wonder what was the point of it all. In later decades, I’d struggle to get my kids to school – scraping off the ice from my windshield before leaving each morning like an automaton. Trying to keep the house warm for months on end felt a debilitating struggle. Outwardly, I always tried to be cheerful, encouraging, radiating warmth. Inwardly I raged, wept, and was bitterly cold.
Around this time of year I typically tried to escape – one year we took an impromptu trip to Niagara Falls, driving the six hours through frozen landscape of upstate New York to view the thick frozen falls. The only sweet thing I remember about that trip was a huge atrium of warmth in which thousands of butterflies flew around. The rest of the time seemed centered on macabre images and ghastly tales of whirlpools, suicides, murders, and disasters.
Another year I was perusing job listings in warm places, and saw a position open in Honolulu. I applied on a whim, my two teenage children hanging on the arm of my chair, laughing and telling me what to write on the application. There was a blizzard raging outside and the thought of living in Hawaii was like a fantasy adventure to a treasure island. I did get the job, and we did move for a couple of years, but things changed again, and that first winter on our return still stays with me as a sort of anguish.
This year I really thought winter would be different. I thought I must have learned the lesson of hibernation, wintering, and dreamtime. I like rest. I like quiet. I like stillness and “doing nothing.” But the horror of the relentlessness of life still beat back against my psyche until I sometimes woke up in the mornings thinking I would go mad.
I know there’s warmth inside, and light inside, and growth happening under the ground, and now that we’ve passed through Imbolc, the midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the sap is already rising in the trees and the seeds are stirring underground. Not because it’s any warmer than it has been, or that blizzards don’t continue to pound us, but because of the increasing light. Nature responds to light.
And we, as natural beings, do too.