Still Waiting For Winter
And its pretty much here.
It’s Wednesday in America. Midweek. Literally. Proverbially. We are like ice particles suspended in the air, uncertain to whether we are falling or floating.
There is a sense of optimism even to the cynical right now I think, hoping that one way or another we can find a good way forward, and I personally think we’ll find it. But that doesn’t make the waiting any easier.
I’m a little kid when it comes to the holidays. I like the build up. The anticipation.
I’m not talking about the commercialization aspect we’ve all lived through a thousand times each in our short lives. They have started as early as mid-summer in recent years, though I think they have realized we are sick of it. And while commercialization is how many people think of the holidays, I think it’s worth revisiting and seeing the potential good in it for us all. There is nothing inherently wrong with a holiday. There is nothing wrong with cause for celebration. The only problem is that it has been commercialized to such an extent that we all now associate it with cheap plastic, and that is a sad connection for us to be forced to make it.
So some of us don’t. When I look around society at large, I think in many ways people have longed for something they haven’t been sold, and now are paused, looking around, trying to figure out what’s next. It’s not only in America, but in the spirit of things.
And here is the problem. And the solution.
The problem lies with the inherent nature of what we have been sold as the holidays. What started as a way to celebrate the cultural prosperity, life on earth through another challenging season, by granting gifts as a token to celebration, to excitement about the future, the spirit of St. Nick bringing climax to the wonderful season, but somewhere after the late 80s, the CEOs that run the selling of things started doing coke, perhaps mixed with steroids and everything lost value and went crazy. Walmart blew the doors off what the holidays mean (and by Walmart, I’m referring to them all.) The injection was gigantic. And too much. Christmas took over December and rather than being a celebration of a religious nature, or even of a community level, it became about consumerism. This built until the point, really it feels quite recently, that we not only saw through it all, but we grew tired of it. As a society, we are waking up to the fake marketing and the bs. The marketing once focused on the season but then tried to shift things so the season became about the products. And we aren’t looking for cheap plastic things. The plastic drugs were fun for a while, but the buzz has worn off and we are left trying to remember how this all started? Humans crave real meaning. Real things. Real feelings. Our true desires, the ones that exist deep beyond our visible consciousness, could care less about the cheap plastic crap. How did we get here? What are we doing here? What is all this plastic stuff doing here?
We look around. It’s everywhere. It fills our beaches. It’s in our water. It’s in our soil. It’s inside our bodies, ingrained in our tissue. We are looking around, and we don’t like it. We want a change. A real change.
With regards to the holidays, the toyification isn’t what it was supposed to be about anyways. The toy was supposed to be a gesture, but not the center. The center is something bigger. More profound. It’s a season. It’s winter (here in the northern hemisphere.) It’s when the natural world up here, including us humans, follow the lead off of the sunlight, and quiets. I can’t speak for people in the south, as I’ve never lived a full season in the south, but with 30+ years at the 47th parallel I can say, winter slows us down. It is supposed to anyways.
Many have come to this realization, but aren’t sure what to do with it. As a result that have given up on the idea of the holidays, of celebrating the winter solstice, of Christmas, of December as a month of celebration. But hell, I like it. I’ll keep the good and ditch the bad. It’s too beautiful a month with an already set up notion of celebration, so why not, even with just our closest people.
When you look past the cheap commercialization there is a lot of great things about the celebration of winter. For one, the light is amazing. Up here in Montana, light is a valuable commodity in the winter. While we are spoiled with days that last until 11 in the summer, in the winter it is a short window of light, and low. You step out in the sun midday thinking surely you can get what your body is craving. In the summer I seem to get it in minutes. But in the winter, there is never enough. You crave more. So when it enters your eyes, it something cherished, and beautiful. We have amazing winter light. The colors, the tones, the shadows, everything about it is different. There is something about light passing through frozen air, and low to the ground, that makes it shine differently in the eyes. Somedays it is refracted through ice crystals that linger suspended invisibly in the air until they pass between you and the sun, and you see them, almost like the dust particles you see floating in your home, but these refract with water the light directly from the sun without being filtered by glass.
Sunrises come late, but the predawn sky in the winter is wild though still subtle if you are not looking to the east. These colors make you work for them. They are short lived. This morning in the east just as light was beginning to break on the horizon, not the sun, but just the early hints of a coming sun, and in the dull yellow there were suddenly noticeable a thin layer of clouds, at first colorless, but then very suddenly, vibrant pink and purple and orange. The sun was still no where near rising, but these clouds somewhere hight in the atmosphere, and far over the horizon line, caught the light, bent it, and passed it on. Sometimes when I see this I want to wake my family. But I know it would be gone before they could get up to see it. That is how quickly it passes. A few short minutes. Then the color fades, and eventually the sun rises, if not behind clouds vibrantly.
Sunsets can be similar. It catches up quickly with us here. Yesterday I walked Acre down the block to a field to play frisbee in the sun. It was around 3:40. I’d been inside all day except for a short creek trip in the early hours before sunrise for my swim. The sun. I just needed an hour or so. But to my suppose it was 3:55 when the sun went behind the mountain and cast a shadow on to us. I’ve lived here long enough I should know better, but it still catches me off guard.
But the night lights are equally festive for the season. As the sun sets we are often soaked in subtle tones of pink, orange, and violet. But these are not deep tones. They are more nordic. Glazed with polar ice and wind that blows in the air from the north. They are cold colors, but still good for the eyes, mind and soul. I have to be outside for them as much as time permits. There is something about these colors entering the eyes, passing beyond the brain, they are a sort of winter fuel for me, even if I’m required to be out in the deep cold to witness them.
We need to celebrate in the winter just as we need to sleep. Our celebrations can be small and quiet, but they are worth doing, even if just lighting a candle in the window, with the sweet hum of wind and music, and our family nearby. The smell of baking cookies seems to be an important part of all this too, right?
It’s Wednesday in America, and we are moving on with our week. We are entering the holiday season, and we get to celebrate in our individual ways. We seek out winter’s lights, the sun, the moon, the sparkling stars. Winter stars are vastly different, both in tilt and orientation and in twinkle. Again, I think it’s the polar air with its increased density and frozen water crystals. The stars light vibrates differently as it enters the atmosphere. I walk down the trail at night beside a creek, and the stars are so vivid and seem to be moving between the bare tree branches. The trees stand stately, cold and naked, unabashed and unafraid. We humans were not blessed with this zeal for standing out in the cold. In our naked state our bare skin can only last so long. The trees do not flinch, arms raised.
The winter night is as valuable as the day. The key is to get out in it. It’s hard at first. Our bodies naturally retreat in the cold darkness, we light a fire and stay near it. We crawl in bed and pull up the covers. But when you put on a coat and get out, the mind wakes to a new state, for me, one I only find in the winter. Just as my body works differently in the winter, so too does my mind. It thinks differently. Not just about different things, but the actually processes of thinking seem to alter as if the fluids in my brain are affected by the cold.
The more I get outside, the happier I am. In the summer this is easy, but it takes a little work in the winter. Just as getting out takes more effort, finding the colors takes more work, everything going at first glance gray if you don’t pause and look for long enough, but then you start to see it. There along the grays of the river bank the dogwoods are vibrant red. The blue minerals that start to form in frozen ice seem to glow translucent. The pink that hangs in the sky just before sunrise…
It’s Wednesday in America, and I’m proposing a toast. Somewhere around Thanksgiving or now we should be kicking off the Holidays. Not the holidays of Walmart and Costco, but the Holidays of winter. It’s Wednesday and I’m taking note of how we did things when our kids were very little… we made effort for mini celebrations throughout the season to not only get us through this darkest season, but to make it a highlight and well suited finish to a year. Regardless of the challenges of the year, the winter is a time we can celebrate the wins, the colors, even when so subtle, especially because so subtle, the why-the-hell-not celebration of another year on earth. It is, after all, the only place we live, so why not make the very best of it? We have been told by our media to be afraid of life. We have been told incessantly that we are doomed. I’m personally quite sick of the doom and gloomers having such a strong voice in things. And then others tell us our only value comes when we are commoditizing everything from how we spend our time to how we spend our money. As with the Doomers, I’ve had enough. The voices we don’t have enough of are the ones that see the true light, which comes with the knowledge that this time on earth is quite limited, and as such to be cherished, valued, held dear, and respected. The way we spend our time is more in our hands than we realize. The way we see it all is more in our power than we’ve been led to believe by this new powerful Ever-Present-Electronic-Eye. Fuck the Eye. We can decide for ourselves how we see it. I look around at the plastic, and I want less of it. I look at the sunrise, and I want more. I look at my friends, my family, the forests, the creeks, the snow falling in the mountains, and the sun glittering through ice crystals in the daylight, and I want my mind to be there.
As I think of this month I try to think of all the reasons to celebrate, and I embrace that. Cheers. Toast a glass. Step outside and enjoy the stars, even if just for a minute. Embrace the cold. Embrace the dark. And let your eyes go the little bits of light they are naturally pulled towards.
Cheers to December, Friends.
