Being Winter

Last night, I hiked up to the oak grove at dusk with my camp chair, sleeping bag, and four battery-operated tea lights. In my most recent session with Palika, my mentor, I had discovered a thread running through my life of a love of solitary darkness and winter’s chill, so she suggested I share these memories with the beings of the night and see what unfolded. Surrendering to a rising sense of illness, not unlike the bouts I experienced in India each time I had an emotional breakthrough, I fell asleep with my back against a tree. I woke to stars twinkling through the twisted, inky branches and a familiarly unsettling and profound sense of disorientation as though I were floating between lives, between worlds. I felt suspended between the impulse to dash back to the solidity of my daylight identity and a stronger pull to disintegrate more fully into the mystery of what in me endures beyond that story.

I spread out my moss-green shawl, placed a tea light in each direction, and called in the trees, the sky, the stars, the new moon hidden in shadow, coyote, bobcat, scurrying furred ones and the six- and eight-leggeds. I told them about my childhood hiding from neighbors in the darkness of my mother’s garden, about wandering the moon shadows as though in a lucid dream and then lying naked in the moonlight, my flesh as bright as the vine of moon flowers, hoping no one up for a midnight bladder release glanced out the window.

I told them about standing barefoot in the street under the lamplight gazing up at the stars consumed by the giddy sorrowful realization that I could not understand how large the universe was, that I could not understand this world I was being asked to live in. The only thing that mattered was that moment of chill, expansive, darkness – of reaching as deeply into it as I dared. Then I would wander inside straight to the bath, avoiding eyes and words that would shake the mystery from me, and feel life course back into me as the warm water burned my numbed feet. I shivered between the chill air through the open window and the hot steam rising, thrilled by what felt like waves of truth from a veiled, infinite awareness.

In the darkness of my circle under the oaks, I continued my story of leaving home and speaking my heart to each full moon as I traveled across the seas; about wandering dark and twisted streets with the stars reflecting off damp cobblestones, donning my trench coat to weave unseen between the crowds, peering inside windows at the warm life inside while content to observe, hidden in the shadows. I felt timelessness twinkling in fireflies above a Tuscan meadow. I met magic on the mid-winter moors of the Scottish Highlands, crunching through snow and feeling the cold burrow bone deep, the visceral presence of ancient ghosts and folklore piercing me through. There were the conversations I had with my past and future selves on the bridge over the frozen marsh near my home in Portland, the long winter walks I took in the hills around Laurelwood where I felt light as a moonbeam skimming across the frozen fields.

All of those moments wove together across different ages, life stages, geographies and yet there was one, singular immutable me present for them all – the me who peers out at this world as though it could be any one of infinite lives, the me who can feel the music of the stars moving in her belly; the me exhilarated and saddened beyond description at this life I am living, at this world I am living in, at all the sensations and moments of awe and heart-break and longing and fear and relief; the me ready at any moment to transform into something new, and bewildered by how much the rest of me resists this with every other breath.

With these tangled feelings surfacing, I told all the beings present how much I empathize with the pain they feel watching my people destroy their world while I stand by inert, lacking the clarity, the creativity, the bold charisma to do anything about it. I let the grief consume me without the burden of trying to escape it with excuses, with apologies, with vows, because I don’t know if there is really is anything I or anyone can do and I hadn’t the heart to offend these Others with what we all know are lies. The forces that have driven me to believe the only way I can earn a livelihood is by being larger than life are the same forces that are rewarding those in power for exploiting natural “resources” and human “resources”. Take life by the horns. Make something of yourself. Take no shits. Shine bright and fuck off. Only that isn’t who I am. I am the frozen winter night sky making itself known through poetry.

Suddenly, something came crashing through the shadows at the edge of the clearing and I was startled back into my body, vulnerable, alone, exposed to whoever might be out there hungry, threatened, or startled. The mace, whistle, and pocket knife in my pack where within arm’s reach, but I paused. Wasn’t the impulse to grab them the impulse I always feel in the face of fear: to resist, to fight, to push away? Who am I to come here and make war with what is? After peering through the chill shadows at eternity, if this were to be my moment to leave this earth, why not surrender into it and drift over these hills free at last? At the very least, I wanted to be sure that whatever was out there had fair warning I was there so it could decide what to do. I found a voice deep in my belly and spoke resonant into the darkness: “You are welcome here. Come into this circle or pass by in silence, but know I am not food and I am no threat. Thank you for allowing me to share this place with you.” There was no reply, and soon after, I packed up my things and walked out of the hills by starlight.

Tonight, I walk the dark streets looking at Christmas lights. I remember how I used to enjoy doing this in Portland with my husband. A pang rises in me over all I have lost, but it is not as sharp as it once was. Nothing in my life feels as dramatic as it used to, for better or for worse. It is simply my life. These are simply my feelings, and I am getting better at being with them without needing them to change, at recognizing how many of them are not about my unique greatness or limitation, but simply about being alive in the world today. Life doesn’t owe me anything except a fair shot at discovering what I can hope to change and what I can’t, and how to stay with myself as I encounter the world, over and over again, however that makes me feel and whatever I choose to believe about it.

A part of me is beginning to wonder if this might not be exactly why I’m here: to feel these things and to share them with you, so we may both look at our world straight and clean and know that we are neither crazy nor facing it alone, to know how interconnected we are to everything that crosses our paths and to know that we are also just one more winter night near a star at the edge of an unfathomably gigantic galaxy. And to feel perhaps just a little bit relieved by that, and a little bit amazed.

Nancy