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Welcome to Winter
Winter arrives with the Holiday Season, and remains after the festivities are done. This is square one, from which the pattern must be rebuilt. Dormancy seems an attractive strategy. I certainly haven’t gotten enough rest lately. Holiday stress distracts. Duty and diversion turn us away. It’s amazing how easily I can forget my supposed preoccupation with the Park.Because the pattern is built of repetition, we can take it for granted, even as we move within it.
We move from season to season, year to year. The closer we are to nature, the less we remember. The pattern subsumes the particular, or vice versa. Either way, we lose distinction. Birth, Death, Decay, proceed as ever, without so much as a glance over the shoulder.
I was looking the other way when the new season entered. It’s awkward saying “the Winter of 1999-2000”, but there you have it; we don’t live in accordance with Earth’s pattern, so we misplace our demarcations. Crossing a border is not the same as ignoring one.
Winter will not be ignored. I was in the Midwest when it started, Detroit, anyway. It was truly cold, days struggling through the twenties, darkness bringing single digits. Lots of running from door to car, waiting for the air to warm, unstiffening slowly in the moving room that provides an essential head space for most of America. Driving is an ecstasy of sorts. The mind scrolls with the highway, while an automatic body guides the machine. The radio plays. 2AM, it’s “Michigan Outdoors”; talk of deer, concern over the declining numbers of young hunters. A disturbing statistic is cited: the average American spends only ten minutes a day outside. Michigan has outdoors all over the place, but it’s mostly viewed in passing.
Space is different in New York; attenuated, yet dense. I miss the open road through open spaces, but here, I walk. It’s better for the body, if lacking in velocity. Still, it drives the mind. Walking and driving, like other “mindless” actions, stimulate mentation. This function is not unrelated to various spiritual practices (spiritual technologies, so to speak); the repetition of a mantra, the counting of the rosary, the dancing of the dervish. All are unimportant, except as means of transporting consciousness elsewhere. So I take my body to the Park, and let it walk. After weeks of inattention, I don’t so much need to re-focus, as to un-focus. Who knows what may come into view?
There is both more and less to see in this season. Things are at their minimum, what with the retreat of foliage, the migrants gone, the hibernators hid. Underlying forms, however, are more visible than ever. No screens of green obscure the view. Again, space changes. The shapes, the angles, the way the land lays, now exposed. The limbs of trees reveal what leaves had shadowed. Winter is a great teacher; we learn the absolute requirements, the baseline for survival. There is less now, but there is enough.
There is always enough, and it is always available. That is the Tradition, that is the Promise. None of which means that it’s always easy to find. There is nothing easy about Winter.