I. Winter
Feng shui: now that’s a concept we’ve all perhaps heard about recently. I hear that people will try to create the right feng shui, or spiritual mood perhaps, in the rooms of their homes by rearranging, adding, eliminating various objects in the room, painting the room different colors, etc. It seems a fine thing to do, but a finer thing to me anyway would be to simply walk out the door and into sun and wind and clouds and air, where the colors of sky and light, the arrangements of tree and grass and drifts of snow, will overwhelm you with their evocation of feeling. The seasons are nature’s feng shui, and can be had by nearly anyone for, at most, the mere cost of throwing a coat upon your back.
But in the winter season, it seems we often just don’t want to throw that coat upon our backs. It is a bleak time: the days arrive short and grey, the landscape lifeless and icy, and the drifts of snow upon the cornfields do in fact resemble photos I’ve seen of portions of Mars. It is an otherworldly time; I have felt this alienness often myself in winter, as if the cold wind had stripped away the film of green life upon the world and now, the landscape laid bare to browns and whites and stick figures of trees.
This feeling of the stripping away of things, this removing of the green which is winter, brings forth in me a new awareness. It comes slowly, ponderously, as one might walk through deep snow, or work with cold fingers. The awareness is that perhaps I am seeing reality finally for the first time. The vast night sky, teeming with the light of worlds far away, descends close to the land; the cold of a winter’s night seems not so different from what the cold of space must be. I leave the warmth of my hearthstove to split dry red oak; in the dead-still cold air I catch the cherry and smoked-meat aroma of the wood, and the bizarre scent reminds me that I am glimpsing the innards of things, perceiving now, in the wintertime, what is always hidden from me. I walk our field pathways, or try anyway amid the drifts of deep snow, and exhausted I stand, hardly able to have gotten myself to this spot, this spot once so well-travelled and filled with conversation, tractor rumble, bird-call, but now lonely, silenced, grey.
But it is here that I hear the swish of falling snow, and looking up, see the so-many millions of fat snowflakes falling from nowhere, everywhere around me and upon my very tongue should I stick it out. I am hushed by what I was never meant to see, but have seen: the stars and galaxies themselves being born, the machinery of creation, there, in my snowy, winter-hushed tomato field.
So we see things in the wintertime, otherworldly things from our ordinary perspective, but real things. The mood of winter is the bringing to presentation of things usually not seen in the bustle of summery life. The ‘machinery of creation,’ for example: this is a winter vision which could only disturb me in my summer work.
The poet Robert Frost feels winter in this way, I warrant. Here is his great poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Death reveals itself to him in the snowy woods, death and the dim presence of some vague owner of the woods, in whose woods death works its own machinery. The snowy woods, too, seem strange to us – Frost’s poor horse “gives his harness bells a shake, to ask if there is some mistake” – yet Frost stops, enchanted, “the only other sound’s the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.” For he sees where his kept promises and traveled miles will end, in “woods fill[ed] up in snow.”
Frost’s disturbing vision – always the gift to those who would venture away from warm village lights holding the remnant promise of spring to come – also brings solace, for although our lives are snowflakes finally dropping into a silent wood, the woods “are lovely, dark, and deep.”
II. Freedom
A walk in winter woods is not a gay affair. It can feel a bit frightening; there is an almost overbearing silence in the winter woods, and this silence can evoke a feeling of emptiness. We humans, we are a social species, we don’t embrace emptiness. When emptiness confronts us, we are apt to fill it. We are free to fill it as we wish, I suppose, but I find that this act of filling is always an autobiographical process and compulsively so. I grew up in a Navy family so I moved every few years, and never had the close friendships which brighten and, as the years pass perhaps soften, the memories of childhood. So, during my winter walks into the grey woods, where the silence lays heavy in mist, I imagine companionship, intimate companionship, a companionship which I cannot escape, yet whose elusiveness bespeaks a strange and unhuman source. I often wonder if God is the creation of lonely children, and the refuge of those unnaturally isolated. To walk in the winter woods is to place a mirror before your soul; the chill, sparse quiet becomes the place of self-knowledge. In Wisconsin, a snowy grove of burr oak is our Bo Tree.
Robert Frost has been to this place, too, discovering his mortality in the sweep of snowflake but also discovering that, for now, he may leave the snowy woods, he may choose the village and ignore the mystic persuasion of snowy woods. “But I have promises to keep,” he says, “and miles to go before I sleep.” And so the loves of our lives pull us too, away from winter walks. We walk the winter paths, but one eye keeps always in view the warm firelight which leaves our windows and settles gently upon the new snow, waiting patiently, with calm vigilance calling us away from the swells of snowdrift and back to porch. Winter agitates us with this choice between the mystic snowy woods and the warm village woodstove. Sartre once wrote that humanity is condemned to be free, but we Wisconsinites have winter to tell us this.
In the springtime, it is obvious what to do – grow, grow, plant, plant; there isn’t time to choose, just move! Things are slow in winter; nothing moves but our own slow shuffle in deep snow, so time makes us look at the act of choosing. There is nothing like standing alone in some snowy field, the cold wind sharp and unyielding, to lay bare the mechanics of choice. Shall I stay, or shall I return home? I stand there, I grow cold; Frost stands there, too, to the agitation of his horse. How does Frost choose to move on, to the village? Why do I stand there, snowflakes melting on my nose, so cold even the dog leaves me for the house?
Choice is not merely some creatio ex nihilo. We choose for reasons, and to stand in the wintry presence of choice is to stand with whatever lightly taps our shivering shoulders, and says, it is more beautiful this way. Frost, in his poem, stands before both “the woods…lovely, dark, and deep,” and his “promises to keep”; how does he leave the woods, how does he perceive the greater beauty of his promises?
Beauty is not some intellectual exercise. The haunting colors of birch bark upon snow, against the steel-blue of a January evening: we do not decide that the birch-grove-upon-evening light is beautiful, no, the very birch-grove-upon-evening itself, the very event of it, possesses us. We are made to feel this way; the winter landscape itself creates what we are in that moment. Read Frost’s poem again; where is his own initiative? There isn’t any; there is just him being there, taken by the winter moment, telling him what it is. Frost’s poem expresses the winter message; before freedom, before we choose, we are chosen, we are created, we are product of our landscape.
III. Religion
It is discomforting, these winter discoveries; the self-knowledge brought by our winter wanderings reveals how created we are, how much we are the product of wood and wind, food and fire. Winter is the season for the solitary walk, because the stillness, the silence, the silver birch bark upon the grey-tinted snow, disclose that there is no real solitude. We are created by things every moment. To feel alone is not to feel like you are the only thing; to feel alone is to feel the formative presence of what lies behind the curtain of daily life.
Whitehead wrote that “religion is what a man does with his solitude”; and I say, religion is what a person does on a winter walk, what a person does with the vague, felt presences that create her. There is story found in the first book of the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She recalls this story as told to her by her father one grey and dull winter Sunday, when the whole family could only sit in the little house and do quiet things. It is story about Laura’s grandfather, and in his time, Sunday was a day of sitting still on benches and studying the Bible. Well, the grandfather’s father, remembered as a forceful authority figure, falls asleep one sunny winter Sunday afternoon. Laura’s grandfather and his brothers slip out of the house, and go sledding. They have just built the sled, and they will ride it just once, just one hill, and then return home. An easy choice, perhaps, but they must be quiet, they must not shout. It is reported that the sled was well-built, the runners well-polished, and only the softest swish was made as the sled swiftly carried the boys down the steep, snow-laden hill. It would have worked, but for the pig which stepped in the way of the fast-moving sled about half-way down. The pig was not silent, the authoritarian father was awoken, and the boys paid for their profane use of sacred time. Such is the ancient connection of religious tradition with authority.
Yet I warrant from our meditations that religion is the rejection of authority. There can be self-knowledge only when we open ourselves to it; we do have to leave the house and chose to walk in those snowy woods. One thing I like so much about Wilders’ story is the courage those three children showed, to defy so forceful an authority just to play for a moment in the winter snow. We must be like that, if we want our own religion; we must walk out the door of home, office, or church, and walk among the free congregation of wood and wind and snow and sky.
These brave children also teach me how to finish my haunted winter walks. They play. Why can’t I do that? I accept that I will not rush out to play right away, as they do. It is the burden of adulthood to perceive the machinery of creation, to know it as such, and thus to stand there in the snowy field with the million snowflakes, and accept it or not. This conscious burden does not sit yet on the backs of children, who play in the world in an unchosen trust or mistrust. With the animals, it is always so.
I want to accept the world, I want to trust it. If the vague presences which haunt my winter walks create me, what else am I to do? They will make me, anyway. If I mistrust the world, I will also mistrust myself.
So I think I should play; if I play and go sledding, then I will trudge hard in the deep snow and feel that deep snow so much that I will be deep snow, I will race down that hill so fast that the cold wind will shock me and that cold wind will take up all of me. If I play in snow and wind and cold and wood, then I will be filled to overflowing with snow and wind and cold and wood, and I will for those playful moments fully know my creators. Our religion is what we fill ourselves up with when we play: sun, snow, rain, waves, children, god, lovers, soil. And I am so glad for winter, for the slowness and the greyness and the coldness of it, which slows me down, and cools me down, to see my own religion. It may be a religion of joy or pain – probably with us all it is some mixture of both – but at least now I know it.