Goodbye, November. Hello, Winter!

Holiday greenery at home

The Sunday after Thanksgiving came with more snow than I had expected. We’d had so little with the predicted big storm on Wednesday and Thursday, followed by continued clear roads on Friday and Saturday, that I had grown complacent, and even when snow began falling and blowing on Saturday evening, I didn’t expect enough accumulation to to get in the way of a visit to the dog park. 

 

I was wrong. 

That’s okay. Sunny and I walked in deep snow close to home, which she found exciting, and then came indoors where I began a project for the day: turkey soup. We live a revisable life, my dog and I, with much improvisation amid the constants.

 

Soup begins here.

It was the last day of November. Hanukkah will begin at sundown on December 14. The official beginning of winter is December 21. Christmas comes on the 25^th, Kwanzaa on the 26^th, and then, the following week, the last day of the year. Meanwhile, on the last day of November, as I neared the last page of Wieseltier’s book on Kaddish (mentioned and quoted in my previous post), I came upon the author’s remarks on closure, an idea he finds a “ludicrous notion of emotional efficiency” and a very American delusion.

 

Americans really believe that the past is past. They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities. 

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

 

This accords with my own life experience, with what I love in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and with what I see across my country and around the world today. What do you make of these words?

 

The soul does not heal as the body heals, because the soul is improved, and even enchanted, by its wounds.

 

Improved? I need to think about that. I remember being surprised by a French mother’s concern that her young child’s fall would result in a small scar. Life, I thought then, as I still think today, is the accumulation of scars visible and invisible. I remember, as a child, being very proud of the slightest scar, happy to have been visibly marked by life, with my own personal, unique history inscribed on my skin.

 

Another:

 

…Nothing happens once and for all. It all visits, it all returns. But ‘closure’ says once and for all. This is a misunderstanding of subjectivity, which is essentially haunted.

 

Enchanted. Haunted. It all returns.

"Love returns always"

A friend asked me to recommend writers who have addressed the question of the meaning of life, and her request alarmed me. Countless people through the ages have written books on the subject, from the simplistic and maudlin to the impossibly sublime, but why would anyone take a writer’s word for the answer? Why would anyone take anyone else’s answer? How could they? 

 

I can see, of course, the value of considering what other people have said, but I replied that I don’t think there is a singular correct answer to the “Why?” question (“Why are we here?”) or some unique hidden meaning already given for all to find by diligent searching. This is not intended to be an answer, mind you: I am only stating my personal belief, which is that we find our own life’s meaning by making it, find something to live for by giving our life to it. We can live for God or for love, for art or literature or history, for birds or dogs or elephants — the list is endless. We may attempt to grow a perfect apple or ear of corn or write a perfect sentence or build a perfect bridge or simply do our best in whatever small corner we find ourselves. Why not multiple meanings? And maybe, even probably, what is most meaningful in one phase of life will be replaced or enlarged by something else later on. 

 

My friend asked another question: How should we live in the world? I feel on more solid footing with that query and hesitate only to put my answer clearly and briefly: 

 

Toward others (and oneself), practice compassion. Toward the natural world, practice curiosity and gentleness. Pay attention to all around you and be grateful.

 

But then, maybe this answer too is an answer for me and not for everyone? I don’t know. I only know that it has been many years since I first felt that paying attention was my #1 job in life. It is such a miracle, after all, to be alive. And surely part of the gratitude we owe for that miracle is awareness of it in as much detail as we can take in. 

 

(Not that we can ever be fully aware of everything every moment. As I sit tapping out these words, it is all too easy to forget the patient dog girl waiting for my attention. And do I even notice the tiny spider in the corner of a picture frame? But what is not the central focus of my awareness is still there, nearby and all around. I smell turkey broth simmering and dried apples rehydrating in cider, see lamplight falling on a bowl of fruit, hear the wind driving snow across the meadow, and I remember noticing, only an hour or two before, that the tall dry giant bluestem grass in the meadow is the same toasted gold color of the highest branches of the black willow trees along the no-name creek.)

Not only is life a gift, but it goes by quickly. Friends who married each other in their 70s, a new start late in life for both, acknowledged that they were entering the game in the fourth quarter but realized that the game wasn't over. A widowed friend recently took the plunge and brought a new puppy into her home. I cut small cedar branches for the house for Thanksgiving and on Friday got out my little Santa band. Where there's life, there's life!

 

Winter beginning on December 21? For me, this year, it began November 29. It is here now. 

There Are No Small Meanings, Only Small Minds

Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. – Elizabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

Confined to bed by a mysterious illness and unable even to sit up, Bailey became fascinated by a small wild snail brought to her by a friend in a clay pot of woods violets. Observing the snail gave interest and focus to her interminable hours of solitary confinement and forced inactivity.

In solitude very far removed from that of Bailey’s sickroom isolation, I was studying alone one evening during my first year of graduate school in a small, almost empty apartment in a strange city. The minimal furnishings of my monkish space consisted of a wobbly-legged dinette table, two wooden chairs, a low coffee table holding my typewriter (I sat cross-legged on the floor to type) and, in the bedroom, a futon on the floor and cardboard boxes, on their sides, open end out, holding books. I was lying on the carpeted living room floor when a tiny, bright red mite, smaller than the head of a pin, appeared on the page I was reading, moving purposefully across the lines of type. Had I pricked my finger with a needle to draw blood, the insect would have matched that blood in color. Another living being! I was so pleased! The next day, as usual, I walked to campus. When I told my fellow students about the mite, they all understood.

Bailey’s situation was prolonged and extreme in comparison to mine, and her snail was more than a moment of cheer. It was quite literally her lifeline. Later in her recovery, she wrote of the snail to her doctor:

Watching another creature go about its life . . . somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in life mattered, so I kept on.

Along with a highly personal odyssey of immobility (if I may call it that), the author explores natural history and poetry, tracing what others have discovered and noted in the miraculous complexity of this one small, inconspicuous wild creature. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a jewel of a book, destined to become a classic.

Wild snails in my neighborhood would do well to continue their hibernation a bit longer, but I have chosen today’s images (photos taken Saturday afternoon) with snail scale in mind. Perhaps a note on today's heading is appropriate here, as well, although anyone who has spent time in theatre will recognize the allusion. In the world of stage and greasepaint, one is often reminded, "There are no small parts, only small actors." Never a star, I drew strength from those words.