As Above, So Below

I see winter, winter sees me.

Dear reader,

Is it just me, or does standing at the edge of this oncoming winter feel different than usual? I’m feeling invited to change my approach, which is to say that I’m curious about what might happen if I actually give winter the respect it deserves, instead of completely bulldoze over the innate seasonality of life like I usually do. Winter is a sacred time, so I’ve been told. I’ve always been too busy for it.

Sometimes I’ve lived places with subtle or hardly any shifts in the weather, and in these instances, it was easy to pretend like seasons didn’t exist, to deny “the spirit that each season evokes”.¹ In California where I live now, the seasons are drastic. The flow of our day-to-day lives is interrupted at least once by a unique offering that each season brings, like road closures, power outages, or heavy smoke. And yet, I still pretend like I know more about what’s better for me than the environment that cradles, feeds, and replenishes me does. I set the pace of my life and creative output according to what’s possible — and profitable — instead of what is nourishing or sustainable. This isn’t good for me, or the planet.

I ignore winter because I was taught to. I spent my school age years in Massachusetts where my mother was born, and where life goes on even if you have to climb through the snow to get to it. My brother and I were part of a rigorous public school system that was notorious for staying open during blizzards. In the morning after a heavy snowfall, we’d wake up before sunrise and dash over to the television. Local news played out while school closures scrolled across the bottom of the screen in alphabetical order.

Holding our breath, we watched the names go from B to D, skipping over C, the first letter of our district entirely. Having shared a deep moment of prayer and anticipation, my brother and I were inconsolable when we realized we were the example and not the exception. We wanted to stay home, but the town’s tax dollars went to plowing the roads and so there was no excuse: it might be late, but the school bus was coming for us. We carried the weight of jealousy and betrayal in our backpacks all day, even if it meant we’d have a longer summer.

I ignore winter because like many of us, I’m “caught in a long cycle of forgetfulness.”² In her new book A Year In Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Creative Expression,

Jacqueline Suskin

reflects on the ways our current culture “distracts us from the inherent information the earth provides.”³ Snow plows aren’t the only advancement trying to erase winter. On demand access to food, year-round travel, infinite surveillance, the 50-week work calendar, and the ability to work from wherever are just some of the ways that the cyclical but unruly patterns of our planet are flatlined into something ceaseless and homogenous. Despite widespread climate catastrophe, we’re still trying to prove that we can innovate our way out of anything. But why did we ever try to surmount winter?

My own life has been largely influenced by standards set by academia and professionalism. I’ve not had to think about the perils or potential of winter, but only because I haven’t been set up to do so. It is a privilege to be so unaffected, but this privilege denies me an impactful relationship to the natural cues and rhythms of the world around me. Without this relationship, it’s as if I’m at odds with the planet, and therefore with myself. Without this relationship, I wonder how I’m supposed to care about the planet at all. I don’t have to stop if I don’t want to; life goes on, and on, and on.

But does it?

“How are we to conjure up new visions and possibilities for the future if we don’t rest when the season says rest?” -

Jacqueline Suskin

from A Year in Practice

Although the Solstice is weeks away, winter started for me on Monday when I said no to something I really didn’t want to miss but felt in my bones that I could not be a part of, all because my bed needed me to lay down inside of it. Every cell was aching for rest. My ears craved quiet, my eyes wanted their lids closed. Under the full moon, my body asked for a Sabbath, and I listened.

All kinds of things came up for me — missing out. I cried after naming that I wouldn’t be there. I thought about changing my mind. I even found a way to flip my genuine need into a story about ending up alone forever, or at the very least not being invited to things anymore.

Then I imagined the winter of my wildest dreams, a winter I can’t recall taking before. I asked my friends not to forget about me, washed my face, and opened a 500 page book that I’m determined to finish. I don’t need to wait around for permission to take a snow day anymore. There doesn’t even have to be snow on the ground.

Love,

Anna

1. Great news: Cat Power sings Bob Dylan.

2. This is where you can buy Jacqueline’s book, A Year In Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Creative Expression. Trust me.

3. A reminder that I am a guest teacher for the new class offering by Marlee Grace called WRITING THE PERSONAL. The class takes place on three Sundays in December and brings together the poetic, personal, and political for essays of self discovery and service. I will be teaching on December 17th, looking at writing about our relationships with other people and ourselves. How do we decide what to do with writing that feels really personal? Read more and sign up here.

4. Sometimes I watch and listen over and over while Alexandra sings this beautiful song. “I’m wild and small, I’m my mother’s daughter, so calm where I lay, and I lay where I lie, so calm where I lay, I could lay here and die”.

5. The 500-page book.

1. Suskin, Jacqueline. A Year in Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression. Sounds True, 2023, 5.

2. Suskin, A Year in Practice, 4.

3. Ibid.