As if we are of one mind, Dave writes some reflections on the end of the year and the end of the decade, just as I was composing in my mind a post on the same subject.
But first, an exaggerated, melodramatic interlude:
Winter. The season that inspires dread in my heart. The Cold. The Rain. The Very Dark Evenings. The Staying Inside the House. The Wearing Many Layers of Clothes. So many things I dislike about winter, but how I love to write about these things! Whoever said it was better to light a candle, than to curse the darkness must have never spent very much time cursing the darkness. It is extremly cathartic, a dark drizzly pleasure completely apropos of the season.
Perhaps you think I shouldn’t be so hard on these, our cold and dark set of months. After all, without winter there can be no summer, right? Winter renews! Winter creates space for the world to be reborn! But I tell you my friend, with winter it’s personal. I have been spurned by winter, rejected, personally wounded by the actions this season has taken against me. Like a rejected lover who feels lost and confused, I wander through this season with an empty heart. Even life’s small daily pleasures lose their jouissance, their inherent joy.
Imagine me if you will, on an early summer morning. My alarm goes off - beep! beep! beep! and I roll slowly out of bed to tap the off switch. The plastic on the top of the clock is warm and hard. I take my first breath of the day and the air I breathe is warm and heavy, a ballet of oxygen that dances into my nose.
I place my feet on the floor and the bed sheets roll off of my body, soft and warm they glide to my side and I am greeted by the gentle and ever-present OMM of the ceiling fan. A beam of early morning summer sun invites me to begin the day. The carpet underfoot is warm and fuzzy as I stand to take my first steps. My limbs feel warm and strong, as if they were preparing all night for this first movement, the first step of the day. I stride towards the bathroom, and when I reach the divide that separates the carpet and the tile, I do not hesitate! I stride onto the tile, my bare feet warming, but only slightly (!), the bare floor.
The aroma of the bathroom greets me, the scent of bath soap and shampoo warming in their bottles, the faint damp of the shower and sink, the passing mint of toothpaste. I turn to the shower and prepare for my favorite ritual of the day - bath time - and I turn the clear, crystal-shaped, plastic knobs to a medium setting, not too cold, not too hot. I step into the shower - the ceramic floor is cool but pleasing, and I engage the shower by pulling a small metal knob upwards. Then the miracle: Water flows over me, at just the perfect temperature. My skin and mind meld into a perfect blissful union. The day ahead seems bright.
Now indulge me if you will in another morning, a winter morning. The stage and scene are the same - my bedroom - but the atmosphere! How it has changed!
My alarm goes off - beep! beep! beep! My eyes snap open. Immediately I sense a chill in the air and instictively I do not move. The deep, reptilian part of my brain which process sensation yells at my frontal lobes, “Do not move! Here you have warmth, out there it is cold, it is dangerous!”
Beep! Beep! Beep!
I struggle to overcome the urge to remain motionless. I pull my arm from under a mountain of heavy blankets and as soon as it is free my skin contracts as the cold winter air bites at my exposed flesh. Instantly, my autonomous nervous system goes into action, diverting my blood away from the shallow capillaries in my epidermis to the deeper channels within my arm in order to keep my lifeblood warm.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
I struggle over the sheets to stop the alarm, but I realize that I am nearly trapped in the cocoon of blankets I have made to keep out the cold. After a frustrating few seconds of pulling and twisting I am free to sit up and stop the alarm.
Beep! Beep! and then …. silence.
No pleasant hum greets me, just the howl of winter wind outside my walls. No sunshine is there to light my path - the earth is dark, the heavens are blind.
Shivering, I step into a pair of slippers. Unprepared for the temperature differental, my body rebels, my limbs feel heavy as I stumble towards the bathroom.
As I cross the threshold, I do not feel it - there is no texture to a winter morning, only the feel of the cold slipper underfoot.
Once in the room, shivering, yearning to be back in bed - I must reach into the icy tub to turn the crystal knobs, now resembling ice crystals themselves, to the hottest position. To run cold would be tantamount to suicide.
When I step onto the ice-cold ceramic floor of the tub, I have exactly five minutes before the water runs cold. The best part of my day will last five minutes for the next 3 months. This is the misfortune, the small but albeit important misfortune, that we are forced to endure during these hard months.
So I ask you, can you deny the harsh face of winter after this testimony? Will you continue to avert your eyes from those suffering from the cold after what you have heard?
Nay I say! Let everyone who is asleep in Winter awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty Winter is undoubtedly hanging over the great part of our congregation: let everyone fly out of this cold state! Make haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, run to summer, lest you be consumed!*
* And here I am shamelessly paraphrasing another rather more famous Jonathan, Jon Edwards, who ended his famous speech “Sinner’s in the hands of an angry god” in essentially this same way. That little literary nugget caused the so called Great Awakening, and while I doubt I’ll accomplish as much here, well, one can try right? It’s also worth mentioning that Edwards was himself paraphrasing a passage from the Christian book of Genesis, which deals with the creation of the world, and ironically, the creation of the seasons. Go figure.
