MORNING PAGES: OCTOBER 11, 2007

So, as if someone

hit the OFF switch, summer has shut down. The days of temperatures in the upper 80s are gone, replaced by highs in the 50s. The bright sun has been covered by a cold, grey mist. As much as one might want to live in eternal summer, the year marches forward.

Forward into autumn. Forward towards winter. This is the saddest time of year for me, the increasing darkness a sure measure of my mood. Yet the year is a cycle of birth and death and rebirth, and the darkness is as much a promise of spring sun as it is a harbinger of winter's snow.

I take solace in the turn of the seasons, that spring follows winter. The older I get, the more I depend in these autumns on the promise that a spring and summer will follow, as one lies down in darkness to the certainty of the coming dawn.

I suppose one could make something noble of this need to endure the darkness. I suppose one could try to paint a saint where stands only an ordinary mortal. Yet the middlewestern impulse is simply to put one's head down and lean into it, to do it and not talk so much of what one is doing. To plow, instead of talking about the plow.

Comments

[poor_mad_peter]

I am one year into the cycle of seasons into our new place (not so new, now), and am looking at the gathering darkness of approaching winter past the equinox.

As it grows darker, longer, I wonder about the matter of "enduring" the darkness, as I've felt for many years, and whether it's more a matter of embracing it. Embracing it as embracing my place on the great cycle of seasons, and accepting winter's fallow after summer's frenzy.

As much as I love daylight, I find I need the darkness, especially for rest. We rest long, up here.

[Tom Montag]

Hi, Peter. Thanks for the interesting response: embracing the darkness certainly is the way to approach it. I guess I already embrace the cold and snow of our winters; I can start embracing the darkness as well.

It is a matter of finding and accepting one's place in the great scheme of things, as you suggest.

[beth]

Yep. And that plowing metaphor just about describes what it feels like to lean into the arctic wind up here. It will be starting up in a few weeks. My friend Nahid, who came from a land of olive and citrus orchards, has never gotten used to winter. "There are warmer places to live!" she repeats, every year, and smiles as she shivers. I know it too, but I've never lived in one; some of us are crazy enough to move further north, and to have to endure a slightly blacker and earlier shade of darkness. It's not easy.

[Tom Montag]

Hi, Beth--thanks for the good response on this. I used to say that the cold is good for a fellow's soul, but the older I get, the less I say that. It might still be true, and I might still (maybe) believe it, yet every year the cold and the darkness get a little harder to "embrace." And some of us move farther north, yes.... Well, we live where we lived for a great variety of reasons, not simply because of the climate. Still, I believe the climate we inhabit helps to make us who we are.