|
Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season
edited by Gary Schmidt and Susan M. Felch
illustrations by Barry Moser
Skylight Paths, 2002. 262 pages.
“Winter has me in its grip,” wrote singer Don McLean, “think I’ll take a summer trip.” Not being strongly inclined to travel, I have often escaped winter by reading summer books -- Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, for example -- during the cold months. Winter, though, has a way of being inescapable, it has a way of coming with us even if we travel to warmer climes. But the new anthology Winter encourages us to encounter winter head-on, taking in the spiritual lessons, both harsh and soft, that it has to offer.
Calling the collection a spiritual biography of the season, editors Gary Schmidt and Susan M. Felch organize their presentation by way of five characteristics they identify with winter: it is a time of sorrow and barrenness; a time to be scoured, and to succor the scoured; a time of shoring up; a time of purity and praise; a time of delight and play. These characteristics in themselves are food for thought. Each could be turned into a topic sentence to begin our own winter memory; each has the potential to stir reflection that puts into perspective the experience of a season that is physically and emotionally challenging to endure.
The world-class writers collected in Winter observe the season and remark upon it in unique and evocative voices. Barry Lopez writes of a barrenness that turns us back toward ourselves: “Winter darkness shuts off the far view. The cold drives you deep into your clothing, muscles you back into your home. Even the mind retreats into itself.” The haiku of seventeenth-century poet Matsuo Basho, on the other hand, reminds us of the outward appearance of winter’s forced introspection:
a wintry gust --
cheeks painfully swollen,
the face of a man
At the same time, sorrow and barrenness and hardship cannot be separated from the act of shoring up, as Jane Kenyon writes:
Reading after supper on the couch, I let my mind wander to the compost pile, bulging with leaves and stalks. I’ve turned it a few times since October, but the pile’s hard surface no longer yields to the fork. Even the earthworms have retreated from the cold and closed the door behind them. There’s an oven warm at the pile’s center, but you have to take that on faith. Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.
We also read of the strange but charming pride taken by northern latitudiners in the severity of their winters, perhaps something like the pride Australians take in their coral reefs or Brazilians in their fleshily-populated beaches. Minnesotan Patricia Hampl writes:
“If you stepped outside right now without any clothes on,” my brother said one day when we had not been allowed to go skating because the temperature was 25° below zero, “you’d be dead in three minutes.” He sounded happy, the Minnesota pride in the abysmal statistic -- which, for all I knew, he had made up on the spot.
The cabin fever that can accompany such an existence may draw us in more than one direction, each adding a specific tone to this spiritual portrait of a season. Hampl again:
The inwardness of the season (winter is quiet) and its austerity were abiding climatic analogues of the solitude I automatically associated with creativity. “Minneapolis -- a great book town,” I once overheard a book salesman say with relish. And what else was there to do in the winter? Stay inside and read. Or write. Stay inside and dream.
Vignettes from Ron Hansen’s Nebraska, set in the late 1800s, demonstrate the contrasting dark side of inwardness, the crazy-making aspect that can lead to human violence. The natural violence that freezing temperatures visit upon human bodies is also present in Hansen’s vignettes, and all-too-reminiscent of much more recent stories -- read in daily newspapers during the ten years of my own residence in the Upper Midwest -- of bodies found frozen in snowdrifts and parked cars. The universe, as John Updike points out, “does not love us.” Human initiative creates buffers that protect us from extremes, but sometimes they are simply not enough. That is an unavoidable characteristic of the season, and one that we cannot ignore if we are to create an honest spirituality of winter.
Taken in its entirety, Winter has an agrarian feel, a wilderness orientation. There is little here that relates directly to contemporary urban experience of winter. The exposure of those who must wait at the bus stop in a thirty-below wind chill may pale in comparison to that of Barry Lopez in the Arctic or Ron Hansen’s Nebraska characters, but it is no less significant to a contemporary winter spirituality. John Updike comes closest to addressing the urban aspect of winter, how it piles upon us and makes the simplest actions complex:
Cold is an absence, an absence of heat, and yet it feels like a presence -- a vigorous, hostilely active presence in the air that presses upon your naked face and that makes your fingers and toes ache within their mittens and boots. Cold is always working, it seems. . . . Cold fights you -- it doesn’t want your automobile engine to ignite in the morning, and once your car is on the highway it clogs the path with snow and slush. A whole secondary world of dirt, of sand and salt, is called into being by the cold, and an expensive and troublesome array of wearing apparel -- mufflers, earmuffs, wool-lined boots and gloves, parkas, leggings, long underwear, and knitted face-masks.
To say nothing of those for whom such necessities are luxuries -- the poor, the homeless, the destitute, who are always among us. The anthology’s wisest words in regard to this winter reality come from the eighteenth-century minister William Cooper: “Next to the love of God we shou’d keep up a warm love to our neighbor. . . . Therefore the colder the season is, the warmer shou’d our charity be; for then the needs of the poor are greatly increased.”
In Winter, Schmidt and Felch have gathered a compelling company of fellow adventurers, travelers, and sufferers to guide us through a time that can teach us, if only we will embrace it. Then will the characteristics they assign to the season become the topic sentences of our own winter struggles, joys, and spirituality.
|
