I was reading yesterday, distracted by my dog’s dreaming, kicking paws next to me, noticing the light at its low high for the day, the mountains bright in the cold clearness of its shine. I checked the temperature and it was 4f. When it gets this cold it feels like time and air and everything becomes slowed along with it—a pulse slowing, a river moving into the stillness of ice. I noticed it last night too—the stillness heavier, more solidly night—like black molten glass cooling, settling.
This past summer we had two large fir trees that were falling prey to the bark beetles that arrive with more frequency each summer with warmer temperatures, and less cold winters. We finally had to have them removed in late summer—reluctant to ever have to cut any tree down but after one of them snapped in two and fell on our deck in a wind storm last year and narrowly missed the house, we knew we were going to have to do something about the other two before winter.
But as a result, the view around the house is now primarily that of birches, cottonwood, alder—and the view of all that green around the house in late summer, turning to gold in the autumn, and now the spaces between the web of branches is something new to become familiar with each day as the light changes. The way that the angles hit differently now, floods of sky in the corners. The mountains that were only barely hinted at now have a faraway presence that we can see more clearly now in winter.
I worried about the birds and squirrels when the fir trees came down, but was relieved to find that they still arrive since the trees’ departure (I say that as if they weren’t cut down but had moved on—obviously still uncomfortable with our complicity in their death, ugh).
On this cold afternoon, the main birds at the feeder have been small puffed chickadees and nuthatches, the low sunlight creating perfect silhouette projections of their arrival on the porch wall. Small shimmers of heat blur on the shadows as well, coming off the warmth of the house (thank goodness). And the blue of the sky is paler, despite the lack of clouds anywhere to be seen—as if its hue is slowing in the chill of it all as well— reflecting back the light from the lingering snow that is turning to ice as it ages in the cold.
I began writing all of this down because I had been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, and also thinking about my writer friend1’s beautiful book and practice of one-sentence journaling. The two books overlapped in my week, and I love how both are quiet, reflections—brief descriptions of something noticed, yet how much room and space opens up within those choices of attention. Themes arrive and leave, only to be noticed again, becoming at times an invocation, something that feels necessary and hopeful, purposeful in the fact of it being written down.
William Wordsworth relied on Dorothy’s descriptions and journals as fuel for his poetry—the jogs of memory of scenes they shared together on many, many walks in the Lake District of England—their thoughts and ideas overlapping so much that it is impossible to know what the poetry would have been without the both of their work writing. Genius never ever exists alone—and there’s often a woman involved, truth be told. Daffodils—a poem I often read to my son when he was young—owes its genesis to Dorothy’s descriptions of such a scene, memorialized in her journal.
A theme that arises repeatedly in Dorothy’s journals is the moon—descriptions of the strength of the light, of how much was journeyed or planted or harvested or noticed at night in its shine:
…the moon shone like herrings in the water.
…the moon light lay upon the hills like snow.
I brought home lemon thyme, and several other plants, and planted them by moonlight…
…but God be thanked, I want no society by a moonlight lake.
These small observations, often no more than a few sentences, so quickly filled my mind with reverie—feeling like memory, despite them not being my own.
I later had Virginia Woolfe nearby—her collection of personal autobiographical writing in Moments of Being—and scanned through some of my marked pages, curious about what sentences had hit harder than others.
I turned to a page where she wrote of her thoughts on writing—of how much she felt that setting down words is life itself, that it transforms pain, suffering she had experienced or felt, or other bouts of intense emotion. Shocks, she called them. That by setting such shocks of memory on the page it leaves her own body and becomes a body of work. She felt that writing them down:
…is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together….we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Some of the earliest works of writing by women held similar ideas—mystics who translated their intense, revelatory experiences in relationship to god and the world. Early medieval women like Mechthild of Magdeburg or Margarete Porete or Julian of Norwich transcended the suffering they felt through writing—the text becoming their way to transcendence—something that felt vital, healing, whole making. Reflecting back Woolf’s words, in a sense, of finding the real behind the experiences of mysticism or shock through the act of writing it down. Creating a body of work.
Amy Hollywood, writing about the work of Mechtild of Magdeburg writes:
These wonders [of her experience] and the wounds they inflict are both the source of her writing and its subject matter. Through writing of these wonders, experienced as a wounding intensification of her suffering, she will ultimately be healed.
Holy, healing, to make whole. Writing brings out this truth—that through creation, we create something beyond ourselves, building an ever-wider mirror of understanding the world, our common experience of it. The we that is the thing itself.
I stopped writing and read more of D. Wordsworth’s journals, finding more descriptions of the moon:
The moon came out suddenly when we were at John’s Grove, and a star or two besides.
A wild, moonlight night.
Beautiful new moon over Silver How.
On Friday evening the moon hung over the northern side of the highest point of Silver How, like a gold ring snapped in two, and shaven off at the ends, it was so narrow. Within this ring lay the circle of the round moon, as distinctly to be seen as ever the enlightened moon is.
The moon was a good height above the mountains. She seemed far and distant in the sky; there were two stars beside her, that twinkled in and out, and seemed almost like butterflies in motion and lightness. They looked to be far nearer to us than the moon.
The moon rises as I write in the growing twilight, the mountains flushed with waning light. Thinking of D.W’s moons, of how the moon casts the landscape in different frames, scattering against heath or snow or mountains—ever-changing angles across these winter nights. And that feeling of connection across time and space—centuries apart, writing on the same day according to her journal entry of December 1, 1801, noticing the light of the same moon.
It reminds me of this beautiful poem by Ted Hughes that I’ve long loved—Full Moon and Little Frieda. I used to have a poem-on-the-underground poster of it that I moved through several homes over the years, and lost somewhere along the way, but because of seeing it so often, had memorized it:
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket - And you listening. A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch. A pail lifted, still and brimming—mirror To tempt a first star to a tremor. Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath— A dark river of blood, many boulders, Balancing unspilled milk. 'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!' The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work That points at him amazed.
If I hadn’t been writing today, I don’t know that I would have felt the truth of these connections—that to write it down, to reflect it back to itself, is what collapses the centuries, the experiences—the we of the thing itself.
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Thank you for the mentions, friend. 🙏🏽
A tree was removed from the corner of my yard this past fall, a situation I didn't know was happening until I arrived home and it was gone. It was quite a shock. Immediately I noticed how the light changed, and how it is a little different every day because every day is just a little different. It still makes me sad, but I also find it interesting. Interesting to still see that wonderful tree in its glaring absence.
Finally, the moon is high and bright here tonight too, and Jupiter, as Nia pointed out to me earlier to look for.
“The whole world is a work of art.” It’s so true and it’s often the only thing that can make the grief of the same world remotely bearable.
I’ve been having a lot of regular moon observing and appreciating experiences the last few months, too, though at this time of year it’s overcast so often it’s not always visible. It’s there tonight, though. First thing I looked for when I came home from a long drive 💙