to swell so high that I may drown me in you

It is a perfect pre-holiday Monday: the sky is a grim iron-gray and it isn't raining so much as it is weeping. It is just chilly enough to require a sweater, just cool enough to claw a bit at your soul. A soft sort of coldness: not the sharp iciness that could destroy, but a nagging lack of warmth that presses one down.

I think the best holidays, like the best parties, require dark and gloom and difficulty. A summer party is, of course, just fine, as are any summer holidays (and I am, I suppose, separating what need not be kept separate: parties and holidays can of course coincide). But to prepare in the cold, in the dark, a celebratory feast demands one bring devotion and desire. One must resist inertia like any artist and make something appear where little was.

Setting the table is difficult enough on the best of days. It is too easy to forget that each meal is already a gift, already a sign of love. To rally and remember--to remember to remember--the blessing every meal is is an accomplishment. And it is the darkness, the gloom, the endless night against which our winter holidays flare out that helps one--that helps me--to see at all the great achievements gratitude and celebration are.

A celebration--a real celebration--is a charge, a determined stance against nothingness. To celebrate is not to turn away from the darkness, the nothingness, as if to pretend that one doesn't see it. It is to displace the nothingness with something bright and hot and sparkling. This is why I love the winter holidays; they blaze so clearly, so definitely and defiantly against the bleakness that threatens life. A full, rich life is a celebratory life, a life that creates, a life that pours out devotion and desire. I need the coldness, the bare darkness, the howling wintry-ness, the breath-sucking gloom to feel this, to remember.

"play louder. you will not succeed."

Of course, Margaret Atwood gets at the beauty of winter even better than I do:

"But still there’s a sense of anticipation: you tense for the combat."

                                                                      —The Blind Assassin

That's part of what I love: the fight. You rally, you muster all the strength, all the courage, all the endurance and you fight the cold, the dark, the bare, the desolation; you fight death. Every act is tattered flag waving brightly against the surrendered world: I'm here! I'm still here! I'm alive and you can't catch me!

William Carlos Williams beat me to that, too:

Again I reply to the triple winds

running chromatic fifths of derision

outside my window:

Play louder.

You will not succeed. I am

bound more to my sentences

the more you batter at me

to follow you.

And the wind,

as before, fingers perfectly

its derisive music.

I am not good at fighting, at rallying. As soon as things get hard, I sigh to myself "I want to go home." Still, I love it. I love it in other people and I thrill at the hope I might become able to do it myself. Winter, with its bleak black-and-whiteness, turns the world into a morality play where evil is everywhere and obvious. In the face of obvious evil, what else can one do but fight? 

fyer, fyer! my heart!

What I love about winter is the hardness of it. Winter is hard. Brutal sometimes. It steals the breath straight from your gut, it pushes you forward and backward no matter where you're trying to go. Winter adds obstacle upon obstacle to normal life: Walking on even sidewalks grows challenging when the ice is invisible and the packed-on snow adds grip-impeding texture to sidewalks for which no one will claim responsibility. One is certainly much less agile in layers (even soft, loving layers) of wool, cashmere, down, leather, and fleece. Even the act of breathing--something so basic so as to be usually unnoticed--becomes a hurdle as the icy dry air cuts slivers into your nose and drives daggers into your chest.

In the places where grass usually grows in the summer, mountains of sludgy gray snow steal color from the cityscape. Gray-brown skeletons of unbelievably living trees flatten against the gray sky. Gray buildings bleed gray slush running down to gray sidewalks, spilling over into gray streets. Ash-tender gray leaves flutter beneath clumps of gray snow to be picked at by gray birds who fly and huddle in gray masses.

Winter is the most beautiful time of the whole year. Can you survive this hard beauty? Can you be the color in a gray world? Can you breathe the sharp air, feel it slice its way into your lungs, and smile from the exhilarating aliveness the pain brings with it? Can you wait for spring and find the waiting beautiful--the waiting itself? Can you sit in the death of the world and glory in it--without trivializing it? Without running away?

Can you be broken, hour by dark hour, by the unrelenting challenges of winter? Can you let the cold seep into your bones and still find warmth to share with others? Can you be the fire by which others warm their frostbitten hearts?

What I love about winter is that it doesn't let you off easy. It doesn't let you bring anything less than everything you've got. Only the hardest of winters could push you to build the hottest of fires, could make survival depend upon the most intense, most passionate desire to live.

anticipating a feast of thankfulness

I am feeling sort of desperate for Thanksgiving. I can't wait. I am longing for Thanksgiving.

I think about it constantly: five whole days. Five. Whole. Days.

I will not travel north to see my family. I do feel a little guilty and a little self pity; but Five Whole Days..Five of them! All mine.

I will sleep, certainly. I will make a cranberry-sage pie. (Practice for the madrigals potluck. Scientifically required.) I will probably roast a turkey (and then make turkey stock with the frame after I've roasted that). I will get to fill my freezer. And I will eat very, very well.

I will probably clean: I will scrub everything so that when I sit down to my turkey and pie, I will do so in a shining home. All will be tidy, all clean. It will smell and look dazzling and delicious.

I will probably go to the Art Institute. Probably on Friday. I will spend as much time there as I can stand. I won't bring my phone--I won't even bring a purse of any kind. That way I will be able to move as freely as possible.

[I will grade, of course. I will have a stack of final papers to grade. I will grade in between scrubbing floors and washing dishes. I will grade in between rolling out pie pastry and basting the turkey. I will grade before and after my trip to the Art Institute.]

[And I will plan for the spring semester, if I can. And put together still more job materials. I will, somehow, by some miracle, do these things, too.]

I will go for a long walk. Saturday, probably. I'll take nothing with me but my keys and I will walk as long as I can. I will walk in the middle of the day, no matter what the weather. I will walk along the lake, and if it is gray and doomy, so much the better.

And I will sit quietly with God. Between the walking and the working; between the grading and the art; between the pie and the portfolio--between everything, I will sit for a few minutes here and then there, and I will sit quietly and I will attend to God.

And when I meet myself, I will shake my hand with curiosity and awe

I wonder sometimes whether I could ever write fiction. My sense is perhaps not--I have very little sense of plot. I don't think in terms of plot; I am not drawn to notice potential plots. But little scenes. Vignettes and still-lifes. I could collect those, I think. I would like to write by candlelight even if I learn to see by searchlight.

I wonder sometimes whether I might ever be able to grow anything. I love the idea of growing things; of plunging clean fingers into rich dirt and planting seeds, rooting out weeds, clearing away dead and dying things so that living things can flourish. I could wear a wonderfully unflattering, floppy hat while I bend low to the ground, nearly crawling.

I wonder, too, whether I might ever have the privilege of caring for someone. Not about, but for. I mean the work of caring (though it sounds cold and transactional to put it that way). Might I get to feed or clothe or soothe someone I love? Who would I be that I could do such things?

I wonder if I will find, one day, that I have grown into my remotest extremities. Will I stretch myself so that my timid little soul fills my fingertips and my toes? Will I sing myself through the top of my head? Will I become radiant with heat and flame?

a meditation on when death comes

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
― Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

I am risk-averse. I hate to say a thing if it isn't true but I'll avoid even saying the true things if they get too close to what is raw, real, and risky.

I feel hungry for beauty and I seek it out in electronic images. Pictures of mountains, especially taken close-up, from the valley below, captivate me utterly. I almost get to the point of saying "I want to go there or to some similar place. I want to see that, to feel it." But I stop. Could I? Would I, really? Or would I find every reason to stay at home, sip my sweet milky tea, and scroll through images on a dead screen? The answer is the latter, every time. So no, no I do not want such beauty that badly.

I am drawn, moth-like, to the alchemy of romance, to the burning fire and passion of it. To think of wooing and being wooed tantalizes; to think of the dance enraptures. But would I really? Would I throw my heart into the crucible―all of it or else the magic will fail? Or would I coat myself in nacre and, from my untouchable prettiness, find fault with every would-be lover? The latter. Always the latter.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.   ―Mary Oliver, "When Death Comes"

Meditation on "There is only one of everything"

All day I have thought I was empty--empty of even the ghost of desire--
but the smell of herbs and water simmering fills me with longing for the life I have.

There is a woman at my church who looks like Margaret Atwood
(In my head, I say, Oh, Margaret Atwood is in her usual place)
I feel Atwood-like, smelling the simmering herbs:

I can even say it,
though only once and it won't

last: I want this. I want
this. 

There is  only one of everything, isn't there, Margaret?

This is my life, this is the life I love:
The herbs and the simmering
The people in their places
The poetry and the song
The hot and thick afternoon air I love to hate
Even the burning toast; even the burning toast
Is mine, is me, and I love it.