Towards a new season

It snowed here yesterday.  Not enough to cover to the ground.  Not enough to provide a child's excitement when the ground turns brownish to white.   Not enough to hope for critical mass that it would slow the world down for a day or so.  No, the flakes barely held form as they hit my windshield.  They were a gentle harbinger of the inevitable.

Over the past week I had two conversations regarding how quickly the holidays will be here.  The natural association means so will winter.   However, I think it's all of demands our holiday season has brought upon us and that has become difficult to apply the brakes.  It seems paradoxical that winter is meant to bring a reprieve from life's demands gifts so many people with more stress.

I try not to be romantic about an old way of life, say just before the Industrial Revolution, which was undoubtedly difficult, especially for women.  It's easy to imagine winter two hundred years ago and how nice it must have been to have the natural rhythms dictate what can and can't be done.  The reality, I imagine, was far more challenging.

Years ago I watched a PBS documentary One Man's Wilderness about Dick Proenneke's life in the Alaskan wilderness.  There is one point, after he finished his cabin and has a fire burning, where he states the room is now toasty.  If I remember right the cabin was 40 degrees.  I don't mind a chilly house.  But, anyone who has ever spent a winter night solely heated by a fireplace knows there is nothing romantic waking up in the middle of night and quite literally freezing.

I am grateful for being able to experience a much dreamier vision of winter.  My deeper animal body wants to hibernate and there will be days that I'll let it.  My hermetic self wants to be home alone, drink a bottomless cup of coffee, read, and write.  The give and take of modern life is that my house is comfortable, but I also have to navigate snowy roads and hope I'm not an innocent victim of a reckless driver.  Through much of that travel I tend to focus on little more than the road in front of me.

Yesterday as I was enjoying a few minutes outside, appreciative that the work week was behind me. As I strolled to the garden area, I contemplated what work around the yard I could do over the weekend.  This is a slow-paced activity, where I listen to the silence that is occasionally broken by car engine or lawnmower.  I watch the shifting clouds and the sun falling into the horizon.  It is a time of paying attention when so much of modern living seems to be done by rote.

I noticed the buds on the peach trees in the picture above.

There are many lenses to see the world, and I'm pretty sure there is a literature, philosophy, and rhetoric to support them all.  I've reached a point that the corporations' or our country's billboard mythological promises are obviously just a way they want us to see.  Most of it I didn't buy.  Now I prefer to pay attention to peach trees in November, the few little chores the weekend will offer, and how snowflakes touching the windshield drew me back to a quiet place.