On Winter

"Winter scenes" by Aldon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Here is what I see. A sunless sky muffled in seamless clouds: one drape of grey. Penciled branches clutching at the heavens. Sidewalks strewn with skins of fallen leaves. Snow hush would be preferable to the cold rain that gives everything the appearance of drooping.

Seasonal affective disorder pushed my sisters from our hometown of Indianapolis to sunny Denver. It’s why most members of my immediate family take vitamin D supplements between November and March. It explains why the shortest month of the year can feel the longest. My journal entries for winter months bear dark musings.

And yet. This is all I can see. I take comfort in believing there is much I do not see; I take comfort in acknowledging my own blindness.

Perhaps part of the challenge of this season is training my eyes to see better. Winter beauty is not often obvious, hides darkly. On daily walks, I challenge myself to look beyond strutting blooms and fleshy fruit.

Against the emptied trees, I see cardinal flash. I see the sycamore’s dappling white. I see sunbright clarify the world in its fading. I see canal waters mirroring forest fringe back to itself, as if saying that the trees, in all their bareness, are worthy of reflection.

Mornings I open the window blinds even though it is dark. On clear days, I watch as the dome blends from indigo to cobalt to azure to periwinkle to the finest watercolor blue. And sometimes, God peppers dashes of fiery rose and violet that force me to stand before the kitchen window and gawk at majesty.

But what if the skies are clouded, like today? I realize I may even have to change the definition of what I perceive to be beautiful. Could this be beauty: the black web of denuded branches, the thousand dun shades of dying leaves, how the birds shiver flecks of rain off their feathers?

Or maybe I am trying too hard. Maybe winter can be just plain ugly. Maybe winter has truth, more than beauty, to reveal (though these two are tightly bound). Maybe it is this very barrenness that makes sightings of the beautiful of infinitely more value.

In 2020, more than any other year, Christmas lights felt necessary. It’s the year Beirut exploded, the year of 53,000 wildfires, the year of so many tropical storms meteorologists exhausted their list of official names, the year of the Trump-Biden elections, the year the world erupted with raised fists after a blue-shod knee snuffed the breath of yet another black human being, the year my friend Cathy lost her husband to cancer, the year my Grandpa died.

One morning, I forgot to turn off the string of colored bulbs we’d wrapped around our tallest shrub, and on an afternoon walk I realized that I could scarcely tell if the lights were even on. Such vain light. It is only when the darkness snuffs the winter sun, when the cold is coldest, that the lights sparkle like a crazed kind of hope.

In The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris asks, “If scarcity makes things more precious, what does it mean to choose the spare world over one in which we are sated with abundance…does living in [the spare world] bring with it certain responsibilities? Gratitude for example? The painful acceptance that underlies Psalm 16’s ‘happy indeed whatever heritage befalls me?’”

My mom has a gift for naming beauty most people overlook. Snowfall makes her gleeful like a child. She still recounts releasing our childhood mutt into the snow, how he would dance in the powder with an unfettered joy, how he was, she says, glorifying God. In the mornings, she gasps at how the windows frame feathery works of frost-art. And this: in winter, after a good snowfall, on a cloudless day, the sunlight echoing off the snow and the ice and the frost like a massive echo chamber of luminosity, so bitingly bright you can hardly see.

In going back, I can learn to see winter differently. I can learn from my child-self, which as Madeleine L’Engle reminds, is part of who I am and always will be. To walk whole into the future, we must seek a garden innocence that once was.

At the first snow, we children would glory in the miracle of numberless unique crystals—prisms, dendrites, rosettes, stars—descending like fine glitter from heaven. The snowfall heralded months of cold and cloudiness, yet I felt such joy, a deep, expansive release. As a child all I saw was the sudden white like raining manna, a gift beyond me, one that covered all the world as I saw it.

Here is a litany my adult-self must recall: moments printing snow angels on the earth and whisking down sledding hills. Hot chocolate ladled from the stovetop and standing over the heating vent as warmth ballooned my nightgown. Ice-skating, snowball skirmishes, running so hard I’d have to shed my puffy coat. And how warm the fire felt after returning home in sodden socks.

Of course, winter can be disastrous for some members of our human family, especially the vulnerable. Seven hundred homeless or at-risk homeless souls die of hypothermia each year in the United States. For my grandparents, slipping on a frozen puddle could mean broken bones and months, if not years, of recovery. Black ice can be deadly. To paint winter in purely jolly hues is naïve, ignoring the reality of human helplessness before nature’s feral forces.

And yet I hope the winter-bitter would offer opportunities for compassion. One evening of my adolescence, snow had left a moon-lit coat over the driveway and walks of our elderly neighbors, a tobacco-chewing farmer named Joe and his beautician-wife Linda. I don’t know how it started or who started it, but when my mom and I arrived at Joe and Linda’s with snow-shovels, we found ourselves working alongside other neighbors: Spanish-speaking Sal and the bald guy with the roaring Chevelle. We worked quietly as I recall, focused on clearing the patches of concrete before us. A gentle flurry of snow spun in the window light. I remember feeling such joy. That this was what life was all about: this warm pocket of community sprung in the middle of the cold. That this was an important, and rare, moment. We finished quickly and returned to our homes.

Brute winter forces everyone, even those who don’t feel exactly vulnerable, to face their own emptiness. How to fill the massive vacuum of wintertime? Often at night, my mind begins to drift down darkly as if weighted with the gravity of the set sun. Boredom looms. The TV is not enough. Books are not enough. Plated sweets are not enough. I begin to question myself, and everything I thought was good greys in old shadows. I am afraid. I snuff myself in sleep.

But perhaps this is part of the truth winter whispers: an invitation to listen to emptiness rather than scurry to fill it.

Kathleen Norris asks, “What would I find in my own heart if the noise of the world were silenced? Who would I be? Who will I be, when loss or crisis or the depredations of time take away the trappings of success, of self-importance, even personality itself?”

These bare trees have something to teach me.

Winter challenges me to discipline my eyes to see, but also to trust there is much I do not see. I do not see the universe underneath the snow-lace, the narrow sheaths of ice that break brittle with a toe tap. I do not see the latent seeds resting in the womb of the earth, as I do not see the child being formed inside my body. Growing things require darkness, long before light.

And, in my corner of the world, cold. A deep, acerbic cold. Temperatures must fall below freezing to kill insects and pathogens that prey on good, green things. The cold, then, is like a cleansing.

As a young child, I would find warts bubbling on my fingers. One solution my pediatrician found: killing them with cold. Liquid nitrogen can freeze warts away. I remember the procedure being painful and I never wanted to do it again. But eventually my warts dissolved.

What if I let the cold cleanse my own heart? What festering diseases must die? What will I lose if I refuse the chill, escape to palmed beaches in my mind?

Sugar maples only offer sweet sap in winter.

The cold can be so deep, it seems to kill everything good and green, along with the parasitic and destructive. But this snow slumber, too, is necessary. In dormancy growth temporarily halts. Plants hold their energy in reserve for new growth, conserving themselves for the green burst of spring. During these “chilling hours” farmers can prune and transplant without harming the green beings that form their livelihood. Without enough chilling hours, the plant will produce fewer, weaker buds and will ultimately be less fruitful.

I am no farmer, dependent on the shifting seasons. But the cold naturally hems me inside. I tend to sleep more, moving with the rhythms of the waning sun. As a teacher, I am grateful for a couple of weeks of dormancy between semesters. When the fields lie fallow, I have space to walk long walks, to pray unhurried prayers. Without this rest, I could not sustain my labors; I would have left teaching years ago.

No matter how useful winter is, biologically or otherwise, it can feel so very long. I imagine that God could have created a winterless world, one where harvest gentled directly into spring. But instead He chose to embed many ecosystems with long stretches of barrenness and rest and cold. He intended winter as an essential caesura in the rhythm of life for much of earthkind.

God intended this space of futility, the absence of natural flutter and action. Bears slumber in hidden hollows. Humans shutter their doors and huddle under blankets. The farmer must pause, empty-handed. The world must wait for the cold to do its cleansing, for things once green to rest, for seeds to gestate in the earth.

God has sung slumber into the orchestration of our spiritual life, just as He has our earthly one. The God who spoke the universe into being could have redeemed it with a word. But after the bitten fruit and shifted blame, He chose to lead humanity through a white desert of pause. Apt how Christmas falls in the time of winter, just after the darkest day of the year. Apt this call to hope even in the midst of what feels like endless waiting.

Christmas: the celebration of the arrival of the Messiah. So long, the wait. A wait that begins in the ruined Garden with a promise of redemption from a woman’s seed. A seed that lies dormant in darkness for millennia. For millennia, God sings this promise through the prophets.

God hides hints in the stench of sacrifice and the way a lamb’s blood painted over a door was a grace. But only hints, shadows. Generations upon generations would puzzle the hints, dream meanings into the words that were breath. Generations would puzzle and hope and die, without ever seeing even the palest of seedlings crack the dust of the earth. Without ever understanding the mystery.

And then, silence. No recorded words from God for four hundred years between Malachi and Matthew. Four hundred years ago seems unfathomably far away: the waning of the Ming dynasty, the inception of the American slave trade. Four hundred years from now, I will be so long forgotten it will be as if I never first breathed. Imagine: this seeming eternity of silence.

Then—even when the Messiah arrives on the earth, He hides in the darkness of a womb. He is the size of an orchid seed. Nine more months of waiting must pass as the cells divide and redivide and the egg becomes a baby. And after the Messiah is born, the world must wait thirty years for the baby tightly bound in cloth to grow into a boy and the boy into a man who will return to the dark and die.

And live again. Emerging from the hollow tomb, the Messiah awakens like all the splendor of spring bound in one body. Indeed, His rising is the only force that makes spring possible, makes hope possible at all.

But the Messiah awakens only after a wait of three days. Spring too soon is dangerous.

In false springs, awakened plants may produce essential petals quickly lost in a sudden hard freeze. Mild winters and harsh springs cost fruit-growers billions of dollars. Prematurely warm temperatures affect wildlife as well. The pied flycatcher has experienced a severe population decline over the past two decades, as their prey now peaks too early in the season. Better suffer the bitter winter than starve in a precocious spring.

Much of my life, I’ve loathed the waiting, clamored for God to move, to act. Enough of this dead winter. I want movement, spring. If my young-adult self could have ruled the world, I would have married much sooner (how long the weeping, lonely movie nights when I’d shovel sugar into my face with a spoon). I would have had a baby sooner (how long the months of trying, the sense of futility, the fear that something was, fundamentally, not right). We would have bought the first house we wanted, not the third (how despairing to lose what we felt was our dream house, twice).

Now I am grateful for those seasons of waiting. I am grateful I had more time in my twenties to travel, to become, to spend unhurried hours with God. I am grateful for the months of waiting to conceive, the months my husband and I bore the gift of anticipation, of praying on our knees again and again. I am grateful we didn’t get the first house, or the second. The third was just right.

Some timings I do not understand. Some still frustrate me. I’m still waiting for some to be fulfilled. I am waiting for the end of war in my husband’s home country of Ethiopia. I am waiting for the baby in my womb to breathe the same oxygen as me. I will always wait. Winter will always be a part of my life, the seasons braided in complicated harmonies.

Perhaps I can call winter good for the same reason a good story is good. The greatest stories are those that bravely pass through moments and seasons of the deepest of dark. The full weight of despair pushes our hero right to the tip of hopelessness. Before the burn of Mount Doom, Frodo refuses to destroy the ring and save Middle Earth. Charles Wallace gives in to the overwhelming pulse of It. The Messiah, the only, the so long-awaited hope, dies and is buried. And yet, there is a yet.

Somehow, by a strange grace, the story continues. Mary Magdalene meets a breathing Messiah in the garden. The redemption is kaleidoscopically bright only because it comes after a long, long darkness. Winter. Perhaps this is why, after months of dark, white days, I feel such an unusual joy at the crocus, yellow and unsnowed.