Friday Joy: Winter, Spring
/Happy Friday! For this edition of Friday Joy, I have a passage from a beautiful Jim Harrison poem that my mom sent to me earlier this week. I found myself reading and re-reading the final lines of the poem, and I got to thinking about why it spoke to me so strongly, why it made me even a little sad.
Here’s the final stanza from Harrison’s poem, “Winter, Spring”:
Each year it is a surprise
That the world can turn green again.
It is the grandest surprise in life,
The birds coming back from the south to my open
Arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.
In Montana, winter is often hard and long. Sometime around Christmas, I find myself growing nervous about the winter months ahead; January and February are often a season of struggle, of dogged persistence through a ragged landscape of grey weather and redundant daily routines. There is very little freshness to these months, it seems, and freshness becomes what we long for as winter wears along its determined path.
This year, I’ve been trying to change the way I view this season; I’ve been trying to appreciate its purpose. I believe that if we humans were to ignore the ‘should do’ expectations that pervade our society, and instead, we were to listen to the rhythms of the earth, I think we could find greater peace with the cold, dark seasons of life.
Modern, Western society tells us that January is a time to kick-start our new habits with energy, energy, energy! Yet the earth tells us, very vividly and viscerally, that January is a time to be still, to rest.
There is still good work to be done, for sure; the earth does not deny this -- it is doing its winter work so that it may be prepared for the work of awakening, come spring, but much of that work is the work of stillness, of letting the land lie fallow. We humans don't allow ourselves this same time of restoration.
Instead, we attempt to push forward with new endeavors, only to find ourselves exhausted and longing for spring, the natural time of true flourishing.
Harrison’s poem, I believe, speaks to our deep yearning for wakefulness -- but what is this ‘wakefulness’? Isn’t it simply a state of knowing? Of mindfulness and celebration of our current situation?
I love Harrison’s poem because, absolutely, I’ve known well that feeling of ‘surprise’ when the earth slips its winter shroud away at last, and the first hopeful green of new life can be seen. We think, in the depths of winter, will spring ever come again? We think, in the depths of our darkest sorrows, will I ever feel happy again?
The cure to these desperate pleas, though so difficult to swallow, is this: To be wakeful to our winters. They, too, have lessons to teach. There is work to be done here, too. Let us begin by following the earth’s example: Rest when the world is cold and dark. Take cover. And then, when it is time to rise up, let us not be surprised at our rising. Let us simply be thankful that we, like the earth, are so capable of rising. Let us rejoice in the truth that none of our seasons, no matter how low, are here to stay.