Sunday, January 23, 2011

On Winter (Jillian)

Alas, 'tis January still and we will be in the throes of Winter for quite some time, yet. I've resolved this year to enjoy winter (shocker, I know), despite the cold, the snow, and the everyday anxieties compounded by snowy streets and heating bills.

Emily Dickinson captures our tricky relationship with Winter quite beautifully:

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.

Winter is beautiful in ways that Summer is not. Yes, Summer is characterized by the green, growing, thriving elements of nature. Summer is projected as the perfect sister of the seasons, full of color and sunlight and excursions to faraway places. But Summer has her issues too: sweltering heat, insects, etc. Winter is clearly the earth's rest period, the plainer sister despised for her white mantel and her cold personality. Like throwing sheets over furniture to keep the dust off, so does the snow hide the naked and inglorious parts of houses and lawns. Everything beneath that snow-sheet is in suspension, getting reading for the Rise that will come with Spring. Without the snow, there would be no well-watered Spring, no glorious Summer, no magnificent Autumn.

I suppose I am saying all of this to jolt my spirits up. This morning, we had more snow to shovel... enough to erase the walks and the drive. It can get to be oppressive and exhausting, but there is still life there in the snow and in spite of the snow: words to write and books to read. That is Winter's diadem: her quiet, her birdsong (without the flies and cicadas), her Time to be busy and create new things... bake a new kind of cookie, grow flowers indoors, take up sewing. There are many possibilities.


Happy writing!

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