Embrace Winter

This was in Vancouver when I was a student. Elsewhere in Canada, eighteen centimetres of snow is a Tuesday afternoon in winter, but in Vancouver winters are typically mild. The maritime climate is tempered by the North Pacific Current and protected from Arctic winds by the high Rocky Mountains east of the city. In Vancouver, eighteen centimetres of snow is an event.

Friends had stayed over that night, and, in the morning, we found the door to their car frozen shut. Temperatures had dropped as low as -6.4° Celsius. Proper cold. Our fingers burned on the metal door handle. We retreated inside. Put logs on the fire.

In the afternoon, we went for a walk. I lived on the fringe of Pacific Regional Park—750 hectares of forested headland on the western edge of Vancouver. The college where I studied was located on the far side of the Park, and mine was an enviable commute on bike through woods of cedar, douglas fir, spruce, and big leaf maple. I knew the forest well. But after the storm, it was to me an alien country. Snow cloaked the landscape like a great white sheet flung over unused furniture in an unused room in a great and dying house. The trees appeared as charcoal sketches, black lines on a blank background, hardly real, ghost-like through the still-falling snow. The sun was a mere suggestion, low in the flat, grey sky. And, mostly, it was silent. No bird or animal sounds. Only the crunch of our feet on the snow, soft and muffled like distant fireworks.

It was a landscape from a storybook. And we walked it in wonder. Wonder but also fear. The trees were overburdened by the snow, and, every now and again, a loud crack would shatter the unearthly silence as a tree or large branch fell somewhere nearby in the woods.

Here was proper winter, wonderful and treacherous. I loved every holy moment of it.

*

I am sitting in my car looking out over Manakau Harbour. It is early evening. I have parked here after work to gather myself before heading home. The rain that was falling in great sheets for the past eight hours has paused. In the distance, the slumped ridgeline of the Waitakere Ranges is in shadow and has merged with a bank of rain clouds on the horizon, forming one dark country. Over the mud flats, the incoming tide laps in the shallow bay before me, and, in the low light, the water reflects like a dark mirror the darkening sky. The wet asphalt of the parking lot reflects the same sky and the grey harbour, and so, it seems to me that the world is one great, grey, wet thing.

I can see car lights flickering between the pohutukawa trees along the shore road. The sky and the sea and the shore are empty of birds.

It has rained all week, an early wet lash of winter. It is the end of a long day, at the end of a week of long days, at the end of a long, hard month—a month of arriving home in the near dark, of sick children, unexpected bills, and a trip to Australia for the funeral of a friend. Huddled in the cave of my car, it feels as though the bleak winter landscape outside is a projection of the inner lantern of my mood onto the screen of the world. Or perhaps it is the other way. Perhaps the great concavity of the grey sky is a mirror projecting gloom onto the light-sensitive paper of my inner life. Winter can be a hard season.

*

You will find no better description of icebergs than Barry Lopez’s description in his 1986 book Arctic Dreams:

The first icebergs we had seen, just north of the Strait of Belle Isle, listing and guttered by the ocean, seemed immensely sad, exhausted by some unknown calamity. We sailed past them. Farther north they began to seem like stragglers fallen behind an army, drifting, self-absorbed, in the water, bleak and immense. It was as if they had been borne down from a world of myth, some Götterdämmerung of noise and catastrophe. Fallen pieces of the moon.

This is winter in its platonic form. Winter as something titanic, dangerous, caught up in its own great, unfolding drama, indifferent—if not hostile—to human life and happiness. Götterdämmerung is the German word for Ragnarök, the world-ending apocalyptic battle of old Norse legend (literally, twilight of the gods). By invoking warfare to describe winter, Lopez takes his place in a long tradition. From the Book of Job, some time in the sixth century BC, God speaks:

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
     or seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I reserve for times of trouble,
     for days of war and battle?

(Job 28:22–23)

An anonymous Anglo Saxon poet used similar imagery a millennia or so later, writing:

and storms batter those rocky cliffs,
snow falling fetters the earth,
the tumult of winter. Then dark comes,
night-shadows deepen; from the north comes
a fierce hailstorm hostile to men.

(“The Wanderer”)

Even now, when its violence has long been pacified by double glazing and Gore-Tex, winter is often used in books and films to invoke a mood of threat and danger. The White Witch’s Narnia is ever in winter in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (“always winter and never Christmas”). Shadowy evil haunts the snowy world on Winter Solstice in Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising. “Winter is coming” is the motto of House Stark in Game of Thrones, and the White Walkers stalk out of the Land of Always Winter (and, presumably, never Christmas) to trouble the living.

And if it’s not threat to life and limb that worries us, it’s winter’s threat to happiness. When we speak of feeling “under the weather,” we do not imagine the clear, bright skies of summer but the cold and wet gloom of winter—grey drizzle, fallen leaves matted and sodden on the ground. The words we use to describe winter landscapes—dreary, dark, cold, gloomy—are the same words we reach for to describe our own inner landscapes when we are low, when we struggle. Thus, the “winter of our discontent” is contrasted with “glorious summer” in Shakespeare’s Richard III; and in Charles Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, “the winter of despair” is pitted against the “spring of hope.”

We are soft, furless (most of us), diurnal animals, better suited to warmth and light than cold and dark. Our bodies work harder in winter, and levels of melatonin and serotonin (brain chemicals that affect mood) dip as the days shorten and the “night-shadows deepen.” And so we come to resent the growing dark and cold. We seek to insulate ourselves from it (both literally and figuratively). We stay indoors. We mope. We deny winter any claims to goodness. We consider it something only to endure. We live elsewhere in our imaginations. And if we can, we take to mechanical wings and migrate to warmer climes, even if only for a week or two.

Winter can be hard. But to retreat from it is to risk refusing the gift of winter. And winter is a gift.

*

I did not make the rain. I did not make the earth on which it falls. I did not make the snow that blanketed the trees that I did not make. I did not make the sun, or its light, or anything that grows and greens under its warmth. I did not make the icebergs or the ocean in which they list. I did not make the mountain ranges that lie in shadows. I did not make my breath that rose before me in that silent wood in Vancouver.

I did not make any of it.

Neither did you.

The Psalmist, addressing God: “It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter” (Psalms 74:17).  Winter is because God freely chose that it be. No created thing is the source of its own being. Winter shares, therefore, with all other created realities that quality of being gift. What else could it be? God was not compelled to create. Nothing outside of God existed prior to God’s making that forced his hand. No lack in God needed filling. God was not lonely. God was not incomplete. God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is, and always has been, fully and joyfully complete in God’s own self. In creation, therefore, God chose freely to share his own joy, love, and delight with others. All creatures and all creaturely realties live within a wider context of God’s free and delighted giving.

Winter is a gift. To winter well, then, is to receive the gift of winter with delight and gratitude. But to so receive—to open ourselves, put out our hands—we must trust that winter is indeed a good gift. This does not mean trusting that we will find every aspect of winter pleasant or even trusting that we will always comprehend what it is that makes winter good. As children, our excitement at receiving gifts arises from our deep trust in the love of the giver and in the giver’s competence to give well, not in error or thoughtlessly. To trust that winter is a good gift is to trust that God is the giver of good gifts (James 1:17). And it is to assent to God’s own judgment of the very goodness of his creation (Genesis 1). It is to believe that winter finds its meaning and place in a wider context that is life-giving. On one level, we know this. We know the rain, the cold, and the dark that so discomfort us all play a role in the flourishing of the earth, in cycles of dormancy and rest that enrich soil, conserve energies, and initiate processes of growth and flowering. But, sometimes, we can’t see the full picture. We are rain-soaked and sick of the dark. And so we need to trust. We need to declare with storm-shaken Job both our faith in God and the inadequacy of our own limited perspective:

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.

(Job 42:3)

Such trust opens us to receive the gift of winter. We become God’s expectant people. We begin to pay attention.

*

“To pay attention,” Wendell Berry writes, “is to come into the presence of a subject.” To receive the gift of winter, therefore, we need to come into the presence of winter. We need to get outside. Winter is not a subject like a tree is a subject, like snow is a subject. Winter is the name we give to a process, to things happening among and through subjects in nature. To come into the presence of winter, therefore, is to enter with our whole selves into the whole system of nature and natural processes and events that is winter. To winter well, get outside and feel winter. Allow the wind to sneak under your collar. Smell the earthy scent of wet leaves. Let the rain ruin your hair. Feel the cold in your fingers and toes. Winter is to be walked.

Near where I work is a giant holm oak that spills water from a wound when it rains. The tree stands over 20 metres tall and has a great wide reach of long, up-thrusting limbs. Some time ago, one of these limbs was lopped off. Perhaps it was diseased or damaged in a storm. Now, there is just a flat stub. In the centre of the stub there is a hole, and, when it rains, water flows from it. I noticed this one day on a walk. I hadn’t paid much attention to the tree before, but the spilling water stopped me. I became—for a moment—aware of the tree as a living thing. I imagined its great vascular heart, the great highways of xylem and phloem that move water and nutrients thoughts its slow, living body. This tree is like me, I thought. Upright. Limbed. Vascular. Living by fluid dynamics. And yet it is other than me. It towers. It feeds on sunlight. It is three times my age and will still be living and growing long after I’m dead and gone. It is a wonder. And I would not have noticed it if I had not been walking in the rain.

Walking is the natural pace of human attention. Sit for too long and it is your mind that wanders. Run, bike, or drive and the world passes you in an indistinct blur. If you want to pay attention to winter, walk winter. Explore its different moods and geographies. Rain walks. Wind walks. Snow walks. Night walks. Frost walks. Each has its own gifts to give. It is our job to notice and to receive these gifts with delight and gratitude. To winter well, then, is to delight in the muffled ocean roar of wind through high, wet leaves; to marvel at the blue black bruise of thunder clouds rising on the skin of the sky; to enjoy the pleasure of fragile winter sunlight warming your face after long days of rain; to laugh at the squelch of mud under your boots; to be calmed by the sibilant patter of rain on the roof. It is also to know what Ali Smith knows when she writes:

how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather’s been cold enough.

All of this is winter’s gift. Even the warlike way of winter can be experienced as a gift if we pay attention. Winter reveals aspects, qualities, textures of the earth that are hidden in the more boisterous seasons. In winter, we become aware of the ramified forms of trees left bare of leaves and of landscapes stripped back to their essentials, to their “bone structure”, as painter Andrew Wyeth put it). Winter widens our field of vision.

And winter walking  has its own physical pleasures. The Dutch have a word, uitwaaien, which translates literally as “out blowing.” Uitwaaien is the practice of walking in wind, especially in the winter, letting the wind snatch at your clothes and blow your hair. Uitwaaien refreshes. The 19^th century American philosopher Thoreau likely didn’t know the word, but he meant uitwaaien when he wrote, “I am sensible that I am imbibing health when I open my mouth to the wind.”

*

There is a risk in the call to pay attention that we imagine ourselves mere observers, as if to winter well is simply a matter of walking winter and having a good look around. But to receive the gift of winter requires that we don’t just observe but enter into winter as participants: winter as a verb. The Bible is not shy in asking us to attend to other creatures and how they live: “Go to the ant” (Proverbs 6:6); “Consider the birds of the air” (Matthew 6:26); “But ask the animals, and they will teach you” (Job 12:7). Insects and animals don’t act in winter how they act in summer. They have a seasonal consciousness (Jeremiah 8:7). Some migrate, others hibernate; most slow and seek comfort and shelter. We are wise to imitate. To winter well is to participate in winter, and this means not acting in July how we act in February. Winter is a time for slowing, for resting, for seeking comfort. Buy a woollen sweater and warm socks. Spend evenings in candle- or firelight, light that does not banish winter’s darkness but warms it, enriches it. Eat good, nourishing food. Tell stories through the long evenings. Slow. Take more rest. Some of winter’s deep pleasures are found when we listen to the animal wisdom of our body as it responds to the seasonal shift.

*

You may think I am making too much of all this. But I am trying to follow the chain of thought that begins with naming God as creator and creation as gift. The significance of a created thing is not found only in its usefulness—its ability to feed or shelter or be made into other things. The significance of a created thing is found also in its beauty and goodness, its ability to comfort or provide pleasure or satisfaction—to calm or heal. The trees in the Garden of Eden were both “beautiful to look at and good to eat” (Genesis 2:8). God has made the world as gift, an expression of his love. To refuse the gift of winter is to deny ourselves one of the constitutive flavours of creaturely life. It is to be mean with one of the ingredients God saw fit to measure out lavishly on creation. It is to forgo (forgive me) one of God’s seasonings. Ultimately, it is to commit a type of injustice—to not live in the world as it actually is.

To winter well, then—to receive the gift of winter with delight and gratitude—is a moral act. It is to enact one of the primary callings of human life. The human capacity to enjoy and name the goodness of God’s creation is part of the very creation that God has named good. All life is receiving. Each breath is gift. To live well is to be aware of the gift we have received and to respond with delight and gratitude.

*

And still, there is winter to endure.

Some young birds born and raised in captivity will show no reaction to the silhouette of a goose passed overhead by a researcher but will exhibit alarm—will shrink and squawk—when the silhouette of a hawk is similarly flown overhead. The shadow seems to awaken in them some deep bone memory, some instinctual fear of predators from the wild days of their species. I wonder if our response to winter is the same. We flinch at its shadow, not because winter today poses any real physical danger as it did in the wild days of our species but because the fading colours, dying leaves, and the dark and cold of winter surface in us deep, perennial human fears—the fragility of the good, the impermanence of life. Winter spooks us.

But this, too, may be winter’s gift. Winter calls out of us courage, perseverance, and stubborn hope. This, after all, is the lesson of our winter stories: winter is hostile, yes, and hard, but it is not the end—it may be endured, there is always hope, the seasons change, under the earth spring sleeps but will soon awaken. To winter well, then, is to practise the life of faithful Christian endurance in a world not yet made new. As in winter, so in life, there is much that is cold and dark but much, too, that is good and beautiful. Delight in these good and beautiful things, winter teaches. And persevere, take courage, keep hope. Each year we are reminded that the dark and the cold are not the end of the story. We learn to look for signs of the world’s great spring, the blossoming of life out of the dark grave of the soil.

And then one day:

See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.

(Song of Songs 2:11–13)

Second image by Annie Sprat, CC Zero

Third image by Ashim D’Silva, CC Zero