Cold comfort

half in daylight, half in shadow

Hi friends—I meant to send this out previously with an explanation—mainly, that I have been thinking about the word sacrifice, in the roots of this month being a time of both harvest and sacrifice in preparation for winter. And was reminded of this post I wrote when I still lived in the North, when this time of year the became a kind of permeable darkness. So sharing with you all this week as we move even further into November.

The cold has returned in earnest here, dipping into the teens, reacquainting itself with the increasing darkness. Silhouettes of the mountains, like stage fronts, grow darker and sharper as the sun climbs to a shallow position in the sky, bleeding rose as it pulls itself along the sharp summits.

The cold used to be a thing I dreaded. Now I begin to look forward to it, finding comfort in the need for warmth, to be bundled while I walk and notice things, like the patterns of ice that outline a leaf in the hoarfrost of the day. The nearby pond becomes more and more immobile with each day below freezing, its surface turning to bone. Magpies and beloved chickadees puffed to insulate their small bodies, the colors of their coats appearing sleeker. Birches and cottonwood now upside down roots bending in the wind, the ridges of mountains more visible in the absence of leaves.

In Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll series there is a ghoulish, silent giant that personifies the cold. She arrives in the night, scaring everyone around her into silence as they hope to remain unnoticed, untouched by her icy presence. She sits on any light or fire she comes across, extinguishing all warmth, heat, light. Like an icy ghost, haunting all who do not suffer the cold and ice like her. You later learn though, that she is not seeking to harm or freeze everything and everyone—she is seeking warmth, desperately trying to warm her icy frozen body, despairing that any heat or light she finds, she also puts out. 

When I learned the secret of the Groke, I felt the compassion that Jansson so deftly invokes—the desperateness of wanting—or trying not to—smother that which gives light and heat to ourselves and others.

Tove Jansson’s Groke.

I had long thought of the cold and dark up here like the Groke. I longed for the warmth and rain I grew up with, the mildness in a lack of extremes. The surety of it never being that cold. The cold and dark of here felt like a menace, keeping warmth and light far from reach, necessitating a type of armor just to walk outside with boots, layers, gloves, hats, scarves, etc. When my family and I moved back to Oregon once for a months-long attempt to move out of Alaska, my two-year-old son on an afternoon hike took to gleefully singing ‘no coats in Oregon! no coats in Oregon!’ running around in the winterwheat green of the Willamette Valley.

Sometimes as I write I can see myself lapse into making an argument to myself, convincing myself of a story—one where there is an either/or to be proclaimed—where I either like living in Alaska or don’t. Of course, it’s messier than that—it’s life. We convince ourselves of a narrative, meaning to be found in the oracles of our reactions and experiences. We’re so conditioned, socialized, to crave meaning in a tragedy, hope and some kind of you-can-too wisdom in a success. 

I both love parts of this place and hate others—sometimes the love outweighs the hate, and that’s a relief when for so long it has been the opposite, when for so long I resented the craziness of this place, the loneliness in feeling separated from the rest of life elsewhere, even knowing that’s an easy stereotype to believe in. And then to find that it’s some of that craziness that I begin to appreciate, or at least a recognition that there is very much a part of me that is grateful to feel separate from the rest of the world.

Winters up here come to be a time of division, where the love and hate come to blows a bit more often. When the darkness begins to seep into every corner of the house and lights hold less strength against its ebb. Darkness that soaks up every bit of light, denying any attempt to keep it at arm’s length. The lengthening November twilights, the slow-to-rise dawns calling attention to the shape of the mountains, their ridges defined in that not-light-not-dark in ways that disappear in full daylight. The moon, bone-white in the sky, reflecting back its cold glow on the landscape. It’s a time of long shadows, a world that speaks quietly of what doesn’t get said aloud under the warmth of the sun. And maybe that’s the point, if there is a point to be had. That like the Groke, we have to live with the cold and dark—to surrender to it as we find it, not fight it with false light, or create and believe a false understanding of it as menace.

A friend this week reminded me of the poet John Haines, a writer who lived in a cabin outside Fairbanks for many years, writing some really beautiful poems about the Alaskan landscape. I picked up a copy of Haines’ book The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, and came across a poem I had flagged long ago:

Fairbanks under the solstice

Slowly, without sun, the day sinks
toward the close of December.
It is minus sixty degrees.

Over the sleeping houses a dense
fog rises—smoke from banked fires,
and the snowy breath of an abyss
through which the cold town
is perceptibly falling.

As if Death were a voice made visible,
with the power of illumination…

Now, in the white shadow
of those streets, ghostly newsboys
make their rounds, delivering
to the homes of those
who have died of the frost
word of the resurrection of Silence.

Word of the resurrection of Silence. That is how the cold and dark can feel—as if the silent dead are near, resurrected in silence. Death were a voice made visible, with the power of illumination.

Surely that is at the root of the fear of the cold and the dark—the death that lingers in it, so near if we’re not properly armored, careful, prepared. That constant vigilance, and yet knowing we could never prepare enough to survive in it alone.

The dark and cold demand a humility—to be reminded of our dependence on heat, light, and others to live. The cold and darkness just makes mortality more visible—but it’s always there for us, near us, part of us

I’m sitting in the twilight afternoon darkness today, as the air warms slightly to bring the percussive tap of freezing rain. I have three lights on and it’s still as gray and dark as almost-evening, despite the clock telling me it’s 3pm. The space around me feels close, not expansive—an in-betweenness, that feeling of wanting to tip the balance into meaning, but knowing there is no meaning—that in the dark, lines become indefinite, shapes become less defined, blurring into one another, becoming something larger, indecipherable. The inclination to see an icy creature come to extinguish what we need to live—instead of welcoming in the part of us that depends on and seeks warmth.

Another Haines poem I had marked: 

Divided, the Man is Dreaming

One half
lives in sunlight; he is
the hunter and calls
the beasts of the field
about him.
Bathed in sweat and tumult
he slakes and kills,
eats meat
and knows blood.

His other half
lies in shadow
and longs for stillness,
a corner of the evening 
where birds 
rest from flight:
cool grass grows at his feet,
dark mice feed
from his hands.

To know blood is part of winter, the dark, the cold.

In Anglo-Saxon, November was known as the month of blood—Blodmonað. 

In Old English, the word blotan, means ‘to sacrifice’—part of a pagan past that reflects both blood sacrifice in honor of the gods, as well as the month when animals were killed—sacrificed in a different sense—to sustain the community through the winter. As that practice was enfolded into early medieval Christianity, the related verb bletsian became more commonly used—meaning ‘to consecrate with blood,’ overlapping with the latin benedicere—‘to bless.’ As Eleanor Parker writes in Winters in the World: 

The root of benedicere in Latin relates to ‘speaking well,’ so it’s about words of praise and blessing, not rituals of blood-sacrifice; over time bletsian gradually took on those senses, losing its bloody connotations…As bletsian became blessing, the similarity between the alliterating bless and bliss meant they often appeared together in medieval poetry and began to influence each other’s meaning… ‘bless’ has come so far from its bloodstained origins, yet the basic sense, ‘to make holy,’ has not actually changed—only the means of doing it.

The roots of those words and meanings are in Haines’ poem of dreaming divided—that the division between the dark and the light of the year, knowing blood and yet also feeding the most vulnerable animals by hand is a reflection of both sacrifice and blessing, merging into an act of making holy. In the etymology of the word holy is the same root as ‘to heal, to make whole’—hints of both the wound and the healing.

That with the cold and dark, the month of blood, follows the blessing—time and space to be silent, quiet, to listen in the dark. To heal.

Gaston Bachelard wrote, in The Poetics of Space:

The house derives reserves and refinements of intimacy from winter; while in the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors… we feel a form of cosmic negation in action. The dreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because of the diminished entity of the outside world, experiences all the qualities of intimacy with increased intensity.

I’ve been thinking about this as I shore myself up for the next months of darkness, noticing how the cold feels—how different the air feels at 12F, 20F, how warm 32F can feel. Trying to find acceptance rather than railing against it—lighting fewer lamps, noticing how warm the bed feels when the dark is a companion both morning and night. How much more grateful I am to have the glow of a fire, even if it’s the mirage of a gaslit one. How quiet the night can feel, how much brighter and colder the moonlight feels. How the cold and dark bring attention to the need for warmth. How winter is a time of intimacy, the cold and dark keeping us close, both with ourselves and with others.

I love how Eleanor Parker writes of that sense of intimacy in winter, of the cold and dark ushering in a time of quiet, reflection, and wisdom, that is so apparent in the Old English poetry she writes of—that the poems

…urge the reader to listen—to be attentive to the voices of the natural world and the cry of the bird-like spirit within, and to reflect on what they might be calling you to do. Amid the tossing of the seas of the mind, and the heart’s winter, there’s a voice inside that may be the call of the spring.