March 2021 – Stones and Flowers

Rabbit in an early unseasonably early storm. It’s about as prepared for winter as we were in November 2020.

Just over two years ago, the second posting on this blog was called “Remembering the Winter of the Heart.” In the wake of a full year of COVID-19, my mind has been drawn to re-visiting the season of emotional winter. In February of 2018, I was grateful that life consisted of summer and winter, both literally and emotionally. The balance, I declared then, was necessary and fruitful.

Since then we have, as an entire society, explored dimensions of solitude that have always been familiar to contemplatives but not to the rest of us. Our homes have become our fortified castles, not just brief resting places between multiple commitments elsewhere. We have collectively bought more jigsaw puzzles and books than airline tickets and hotel reservations.

Photo of book shelves in my library, which also contain numerous jigsaw puzzles.

Enough people discovered the joys of baking bread that yeast became scarce. Enough people re-discovered – or discovered – the joys of gardening that last spring there was a shortage of seeds (let’s hope that suppliers are ready for this spring).

Photo of our garden in mid-summer with everything green and bushy, doing very well indeed.

Liquor consumption has increased. Sociologists will be busy for many years studying the results of this massive global experiment in drastically changing cultural behaviour.

Now that spring is on its way (there will still be winter storms where I live, but we know the snow won’t last), and the roll-out of vaccines promises an end to the siege of COVID-19, I want to speak my thanks for the deepening of thought and the deliberate fostering of loving connections that occurred in this great collective Winter of the Heart. The additional solitude, and the waves of insecurity, have underlined our vulnerability and offered us space and time to turn depleted energy into important self-reflection.

We have had time to learn to see subtler shades of white and grey. When the lure of screen-delivered distractions palled, our eyes rested on bland white and saw it as miraculously varied.

photo of huge snow drifts with shades of white and grey and the hint of a barbed wire fence across the top.

Hoar-frost covered trees and shrubs around a small clearing where the white snow is patterned with shadows of the branches.

Hoar-frost covered weeds, bending with the weight of the frost, against a background of snow with shadows turned blue by the angle of light.

We have had time to let boredom metamorphose into bone-deep relaxation. Restfulness acquired expansiveness. Urgency lost its hold and immediacy its power to corral all senses.

Admittedly, that state of not-quite-hibernation was not the prerogative of everyone.

I hereby acknowledge that I write out of the privilege of the retired and adequately funded. For many, this year of the pandemic has meant extra work, multiplied tensions, fear of unending poverty, the weight of loss upon loss, or even loneliness so all pervasive and crushing that being at rest felt more like being comatose. Contemplation itself lost all meaning. I want to hold these grim experiences in balance with my personal effort to be grateful and to be, despite everything, at home in this intensified winter of the heart.

We have had, after all, time enough to nurture compassion. In fact, all our creativity has been required to continue to stay connected to the ones we love and to reach out to those whose pain has, for whatever reasons, become part of our own consciousness as well. While sometimes anger seemed the only feasible response to the statistics and to the blindly furious missives flooding social media, there has been time enough in this winter of inside and outside the heart to let go of all that anger and see instead the fear lurking behind the eyes.

Whatever their attendant annoyances (fogged up glasses, unseen smiles, unheard syllables), masks should have taught us to look people in the eye. And to listen more closely, not only to the actually spoken word but also to the intense desire to know and to be known. “Who are you, really? What’s going on in your wintry heart?”

This season of the winter of the heart has also taught more of us to walk, not to get anywhere in a hurry or to compete with someone else in how many steps can be taken, but to walk for the sake of walking. To walk in order to feel and see that the world around us is beautiful and various. To breathe the air that rejuvenates and is safe.

To envy the swarm of company that the cedar waxwings enjoy.

To hear the chickadees call out “chick-a-dee-dee-dee,” or “hey, sweetheart!” Even when eyes are so blinded by tears that the path is felt rather than seen, the simple language of birds is wonderfully reassuring to “their lonely betters” who have promises to keep (W.H. Auden), and who simply can’t keep them now.

The promise of winter, however, is that spring always follows. There will be a real summer in our landscapes and in our hearts, even if, for some of us, there is an unfathomable “feast of losses” to live through. Even if – perhaps because – the feasts of losses are also collective. Sorrow and beauty come to us all, just as winter and summer come to us all.

Oh, Wind, if winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Percy Byssche Shelley

In between the hard places and the dry places, beauty makes itself known.

All photos in this post taken by Arnold Voth

Two canoes negotiates serious rapids, against the background of a high cliff.

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. And you may not even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm is all about.”
Haruki Murakami

Something there is about life that is uncannily cyclical. Make what choices we will, sooner or later we will return, however unknowingly, to situations that we’ve been through before. The outward circumstances might be very different, yet the inner core of the experience will be familiar enough that our emotional radar will recognize we’ve been here before. And our inner self, the subconscious that we sense only fleetingly, will know that there is unfinished business to tend to, while our outer self will react instinctively according to old patterns.

Case in point: I was only 44 years old when my father died, my first real experience of death in the family. A consoling friend warned me that grief was more complicated than I might expect. Using an analogy of a glass of wine, she told me that I would have to drink the full measure of grief. If I resisted, I would have to keep sipping, time and again, until I got down to the dregs. Despite my inexperience, I thought that sounded reasonable.

Unfortunately, circumstances demanded an unreasonable response. Our three children were still young, our oldest just into his teens. I was now mostly responsible for my mother who had just been moved into a nursing home. I had barely begun PhD studies and the scholarship money was necessary. Neither time nor emotional energy was available for grieving.

My friend had been right, though. It is possible to postpone grief, but not wise. Every now and then, I was blindsided, often most inopportunely, by uncontrollable weeping, or by hours of emotional paralysis. The glass of wine had to be emptied. Sometimes, I swore that new grief would fill it again when I thought I had already reached the dregs.

Another case: at a formal banquet and dance, our table included one of those men whose professional life had taught him that he should always be in control, even of conversations. Moreover he knew everything about everything. Having heard that I was teaching at St. Thomas More College, he began holding forth about how lax university officials had become about plagiarism and cheating. Although he was not a teacher, he knew exactly how those nasty students should be handled. Every time I attempted to explain the process or my experiences, I was cut off. When the conversation came up again later, in between dances, I abruptly walked away in the middle of the conversation, with not even an excuse.

Safely alone in the bathroom, I took a few deep breaths. I was actually shaking and my heart was pounding. My fear of my interlocutor and my deep embarrassment at an obvious social faux pas vied for emotional attention. Why hadn’t I simply called him out for his arrogance? That could be done with some courtesy. Or, if confrontation felt too threatening, couldn’t I have ended the conversation more politely? Why had I been so intimidated?

Later that night as I lay sleepless, I concluded that I’d just taken another turn around the spiral. As a child, I had learned too well that bad consequences followed when I spoke my mind, whether in direct conversation with authority or in more social occasions. I had developed then a pattern of avoidance: stay silent, keep out of trouble. That wretched conversation in an otherwise lovely evening had activated old emotions; my gut knew that feeling of being pushed into acquiescence. My well-practiced response had been to flee, to disappear.

Old behaviour patterns, I think, are more troublesome than grief, because we usually know the source of the grief. Learned instinctive reactions, though, can lurk beneath the surface of civility for decades. My wallflower impulse remains. However, my increased understanding of where it comes from could (should?) help me choose other actions. Not easy, by no means. Also not impossible.

A final point: the upward turns on the spiral journey are not necessarily inflicted on us against our will. Crucial decisions, major steps in religious or philosophical rethinking, present us with a choice: enter the next round of the journey or avoid it. Poet Margaret Avison, in “The Swimmer’s Moment,” depicts such a choice as a whirlpool: “Many at that moment will not say, / ‘This is the whirlpool, then,’” and will, instead, “refuse” to enter. They will thus be spared “from the black pit, and also from contesting / the deadly rapids.”

Close up of rapids against a cliff. No humans or boats in the photo.

Placid river in Heritage Park, Edmonton. It's sunset and there's a mist rising from the water.

But the choice isn’t merely a matter of maintaining the status quo or daring the whirlpool; there are consequences on either side of that “or.” Those who avoid the whirlpool and the rapids are also “spared” from “emerging in / The mysterious, and more ample, further waters” (italics mine).

The whirlpool-fearers could have lost something important, even wonderful, “And so their bland-blank faces turn and turn / Pale and forever on the rim of suction / They will not recognize.” The turning and returning continues, but without any progress.

Just what Avison intended her “swimmer’s moment” to signify, I’m not certain. Her usual complexity invites readers to explore multiple meanings. For me, the dreaded whirlpool has visual and emotional kinship with the image of the spiral journey. There are indeed times when yet another go-around through particularly painful parts of our progress toward maturity and wholeness seems too much like entering a whirlpool from which there might be no exit into peaceful waters, a defeat that Avison admits is possible. Either side of a choice entails risk, even if the prospect of stasis can initially seem safe. The rosebud that refuses to open can only wilt. Better then to welcome the journey.

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
Anais Nin

Stones and Flowers

Month: March 2021

Remembering the Winter of the Heart – a Reprise

Avoid Not the Journey