Embracing Winter's Stillness

And why we used chicken wire to keep the squirrels from the tulip bulbs

Photo by Kevin B.

It was late morning, the air heavy but calm, the clouds hung low, a misty drizzle after a cold night with a few snow flurries. Perfect for walking in my black rain slicker and leaning into the melancholy stillness of a near-winter day.

I took the dog and we walked farther and longer than I had planned, considering the weather. It was as if I could walk forever, over the train tracks and the hills, beyond the funky old-school bars along the main road, and the closed shops, until the horizon melted to fog. There was no one to see. No one was out. The dampness was all around and seeping into me. Yet it was welcome. Needed, in a way, as my mood was a blend of blues and acceptance, of reality and dreams, the kind of melancholy you can’t always put your finger on, My wife might have commented how my “Irish was showing.” Yeats said, “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

He wasn’t wrong.

The gloomy quietness embraced me and I it. Like we were friends, buddies falling into our whiskeys at a bar on a cold winter night. A kind of comfort in the misery, although minor and in the larger sense, rather inconsequential. This was not desolation. This was a kind of low-level brooding. A winter’s mood. One that would take me through streets of barren trees and leafless bushes, mixed in with the adornments of the season, the silly blow-up Santas planted in front yards next to tall pines decorated in silver garland and golden stars, symbols of the seasonal skirmish between materialism and idealism.

I thought a great deal on the walk about how I was feeling that day, and not so much about why. It was more important to simply accept and embrace my mood. To learn to love it. Not necessarily to understand it or analyze it. Nietzsche believed that the ultimate challenge in life is amor fati—to love your fate. A recent post at the popular site Tricycle, reminded me that fate, in Nietzsche’s world is the simple, unchangeable “given” in a life: what simply is, whether we like it or not. He believed that self-pity, or regret, disappointment, and or moodiness over the reality of anything we face were signs of spiritual weakness. Appreciating your life, even the bruises, explained or not, is the key. And also to understand that nothing lasts, the good or the bad, or the in between. The constant is change. Still, through any despair, we must learn to protect the most beautiful parts of a life, learn to nurture them and shield them from menace, or the perceived or real emotional villain, even when we are walking the neighborhood in the rain.

With a half-hour behind me, I had arrived home. The light dusting of overnight snow had melted; I could see our home’s front garden plot more clearly. In the mulch surrounding a small tree, my wife and I had staked chicken wire to the ground. Several inches below ground and under the wire were newly planted tulip bulbs, dozens of them, These would be our first salute to spring when winter would lose its grip on us. The strong, steady, and beautiful flowers would fight through the chilled earth and out to the gloomy early spring sky and open up tiny blooms of seasonal joy. We hoped that the chicken wire would deter the squirrels from finding a feast, as they had in the past. We were guarding the coming pleasure of a colorful spring; this was our shield against disappointment, a reminder that a melancholy day would not last.

It’s right and worthy to accept personal gloom, to regard it as part of life’s fate, to embrace it and sit with it, to take it in. But it is also necessary to see it as one’s duty to prepare the ground for the coming joys, to make a point to protect the seeds of happiness and to shelter the earth where all the tulips grow.