"How to Savor Winter: A Century-Old Poetic Recipe for Bliss in the Bleakest Season"
Bleak and barren, winter is the season when nature is silently preparing to burst forth in spring — the grand incubator of life. Rilke saw a human equivalence when he celebrated winter as the time for tending to your inner garden. His contemporary Dallas Lore Sharp (December 13, 1870–November 29, 1929) — a former clergyman, whom the great John Burroughs lauded as America’s greatest nature writer — captured this delicate dialogue between nature and human nature in his 1912 book Winter (public library | public domain) — a lyrical effort “to catch the spirit of the season… the large, free, strong, fierce, wild soul of Winter,” to channel “the bitter boreal might… that is wild and fierce and strong and free and large within us.”
Maria Popova continues...
And Margaret Renkl today shares a similar message.
This year the winter solstice arrives on Dec. 21 in the shank of the dark afternoon. Officially the first day of astronomical winter, the solstice is better known as the shortest day of the year. I prefer to think of it as the longest night of the year, for I am making friends with darkness.
For most of my life, I looked forward to the solstice because it signals a shift to longer days. I was never a fan of winter, and earlier sunrises and later sunsets always felt to me like a kind of compensation for the cold. But my heart has been thawing these past years, watching as winter becomes ever more fragile, its cold imperiled by the changing climate, its darkness by our own foolishness and fear...
They're both exhibiting George Santayana's resolution to get over an impractical and exclusive infatuation with the lengthening light that follows the winter solstice. "To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring." That's a wise conclusion other animals presumably cannot (and need not) rationalize, they just adapt to change and don't dread or even consider the prospect of death.
In the middling zone called middle Tennessee, we don't get many brutally cold winter days. It was 26 at dawn this morning, the dogs and I went out in it for a few minutes and will enjoy a longer walk around mid-day when it's a balmy 40. But the holiday weekend forecast is foreboding. We'll still walk, but my wife will insist that they wear their preposterous sweaters. We're a splashy sight to see on those arctic days, with me in my luminescent yellow "Don't hit us" jacket and them pretty (silly) in pink.
And what if they call us a trio of pathetic peripatetics? So what if they do, we say. We're too interested in the changing seasons to mind.
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