not a cloister but a cocoon?

a hopeful thought: maybe I have had to become very small (inside) so I could expand in some new way.

wildness and discipline

"The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent."

The current issue of Vogue offers an excerpt from Helen Macdonald's memoir of grief and falconry, H is for Hawk, due for release on March 3 of this year. The writing is very good and the story sounds interesting, but the sentence I quoted above arrested my attention, pulling my imagination hawkward.

It is a beautiful sentence, balanced and elegant in its imagery and composition. Rhythmically, it satisfies. Emotionally and imaginatively, it challenges: what does wildness feel like? What does such a house, a home so filled feel like?

I've been too long tame. There must be in me talons and a taste for blood.

Christians rise! the world is bare and bleak and dark with want and care

It can be difficult to push oneself to work hard only for one's own self. (I have written about this before.) This year I had lofty plans for my Thanksgiving. Even if I was to spend it alone, I intended to feast sumptuously: turkey, gravy, pie, and wine. I was going to take excellent care of myself. Then I invited a guest and looked forward to sharing the celebration. A day or two before the holiday, I felt my own weariness and I knew absolutely that, were I not expecting a guest, I would have cancelled my feast. I might have made a bowl of popcorn or a plate of eggs and called it a day. I would have forgone the whole thing--too much effort to do it all just for myself.

I think there is a tendency, at least in myself, to sink to such a comfortable kind of laziness in many areas of life. It's just me, so why bother? It's only for myself, so why go to any trouble? I only have myself to care for, so I needn't work too hard--I don't need much.

If I hadn't roused the energy to cook the feast, I wouldn't have been able to share it with anyone on Thanksgiving Day. I knew someone would be coming over, and so I cooked and tidied up and cleaned house--all things I wanted to do for myself, but would not have done. And the day was lovely. Knowing there is a definite someone to work for and with, a definite someone with whom to share things can be an excellent stimulant. And that is a perfectly fine thing.

The next step, the next goal or project, is to work for an indefinite someone, toward indefinite others with whom to share things. To be ready to share one's surplus, to be ready to be a generous host, to be ready to give what one has made, even without a known recipient or guest to anticipate. To be ready in case Someone comes.

If you want to hear the angels commanding you to share what you've got, then you've got to get something to share:

If ye would hear the angels sing

    "Peace on earth and mercy mild,"

    Think of him who was once a child,

On Christmas Day in the morning.

If ye would hear the angels sing,

    Rise, and spread your Christmas fare;

    'Tis merrier still the more that share,

On Christmas Day in the morning.

Rise and bake your Christmas bread:

    Christians, rise! the world is bare,

    And blank, and dark with want and care,

Yet Christmas comes in the morning.

If ye would hear the angels sing,

    Rise, and light your Christmas fire:

    And see that ye pile the logs still higher

On Christmas Day in the morning.

Rise, and light your Christmas fire;

    Christians, rise! the world is old,

    And Time is weary, and worn, and cold,

Yet Christmas comes in the morning.

If ye would hear the angels sing,

    Christians! see ye let each door

    Stand wider than it e'er stood before,

On Christmas Day in the morning.

Rise, and open wide the door;

    Christians, rise! the world is wide,

    And many there be that stand outside,

Yet Christmas comes in the morning. 

--Dora Greenspan                                                                                                            

on being the bullet others dodged

I saw a man I once dated the other evening. He smiled and said hello, and I did the same. It was perfectly pleasant. I believe he's now married, and has kids; he seems to be quite happy.

I remember picking fights. I remember him telling me that it seemed I always had one foot out the door. I remember telling him he could burn any of the things I had left at his place "like he burned my trust in [him]." And I remember how we laughed over that not long after I'd said it. I remember how volatile I was. I remember how unfaithful I was. Unfaithful in so many ways. I remember feeling piercing jealousy. I remember how little I respected him. And I remember how I took his kindness as proof of his weakness, of his blindness.

I remember not wanting him, and I also remember the pain of his rejection of me. I wondered whether the lung-crushing pain of missing the shape and warmth of his body while we slept would ever go away. (It did.)

It is unpleasant to think of myself as that person I was. How on earth am I to be trusted?

He and others like him from my past seem to have recovered nicely. Many of my previous partners have lovely wives, stable jobs, and beautiful children. I don't seem to have ruined anything. But I still will always have been that person.

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.