Midwinter

MIDWINTER

A little bit
Of the receding sun
Now gilds the hills
Across the lake from me.
Midwinter's day
Draws to its early close,
Dusk paints the world
In silver-grey.
Against the frozen blue
The golden light of lamps
Begins to shine from living rooms,
The warmth of family meals
Scenting the air.
The cat
Purrs on the couch.

26. 12. 2013

Winter Light

I was going to write a deep, thought-provoking post today, but then I thought, Naaah, it's Christmas time. It's supposed to be about being jolly, and holly, and other things ending in -olly. (That's a shameless quote from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather. Thank you, Sir Terry.) So I decided to think about Christmassy things instead.

Early this morning, I dreamt that I had had to move to Australia quite suddenly. And as we were carrying things into our house there, I felt really disoriented, because I had no idea where anything was in that town, or how things are done Down Under - I woke up still thinking I should google the place, so I could at least see on a map of Australia where I was and then perhaps find the nearest grocery store. Anyway, the point of my telling you this: I got to thinking: I don't know that I would like being Down Under for Christmas. It would seem really weird - kind of wrong - to have Christmas in the middle of summer. Christmas needs darkness, and cold, and winter, at least for this Northerner it does.

Part of the fun and atmosphere of the Christmas celebration is the lights, and they need darkness to set them off. This year we put up perhaps the charlie-browniest of Charlie-Brown-trees ever (Love it. It came from the woods behind our house.). And for all its sad, thin branches, once the lights were on, it was transformed. It's beautiful. The light shines in the darkness - that's what Christmas is all about, isn't it?

And then there's winter sunlight. It has a completely different quality about it than sunlight at the other times of the year. Some years ago, I was looking at an art book, in which the author was demonstrating how to turn a summer photo of a wooded landscape into a snow scene. But the problem was that what she was doing didn't work. The author lived somewhere south, might have been Southern California, and by her own admission had never really seen a snowy landscape. The snow was painted well enough, with blue shadows and all, but the angle of the light was all wrong. She just kept the shadows cast by the sun in her southern-latitudes photo, but a sun that high would never produce snowy weather; her summer-sun snow painting felt really bizarre to me. A winter scene in the Northern latitudes is determined more by the angle of the light than by the snow lying on the ground. See? Those trees are most emphatically winter trees, sitting on my kitchen counter with the winter noon sun shining on them through my south-facing window.

I love winter light, the low, slanted noon sunlight falling through my window, and the sparkling, twinkling, warm light of candles and Christmas trees at night. And soon, very soon, the light will turn, and all will gradually become brighter again. The sun will rise in the morning when I need to get up, and then long before I need to get up (and I will grumble at it then), and the darkness will be, yet again, banished to its short night time. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not prevail.

Incidentally, none of this means that if any of you Kiwis or Ozzies wanted to invite me for Christmas (and pay the airfare), I'd turn down the invitation. I might not want to move Down Under, but I'd love to come for a visit!

Life, the Universe, and Light in the Darkness. Winter will pass soon enough.

Silence

I haven't been saying much on here lately. And it's not because I haven't got anything in my head - rather the contrary, it's because my head is too full of thoughts. For weeks now, morning til night, I've been reading, studying, thinking, writing, thinking some more, reading again, thinking, writing… (and so on and so forth - you get the picture). It's a deluge of thought, and my mind will not be still.

A few years ago, someone I knew, who was writing a column for the local paper, wanted to post a piece on Silence. He gave the paper his column for the week, and what he had meant it to look like is this:

SILENCE












Unfortunately, the typesetter didn't quite get the memo, and set the page in standard style, filling in the empty space with STUFF (I can't quite remember what it was, might have been advertising). It rather spoiled the effect, or, as it were, had an effect of its own. We can't bear empty spaces, cannot tolerate silence.

This past weekend, on two separate occasions, I had the opportunity to practise silence. And the remarkable thing was that it was corporate silence - silence with other people. Twice, I sat in a room (well, once it was a church), among strangers for the most part, and everyone was completely still. Doing nothing but being silent. Meditation, contemplation. Silence. And it was powerful.

Now, on a daily basis, my life isn't particularly noisy as far as decibel level is concerned. I live in a quiet house with a rather quiet family; these days, I can hear the clock tick-tocking almost daily. But what is lacking is that inner silence, that space in which my mind has nothing else to do but be still. And that is what these spaces of corporate silence last weekend gave me a glimpse of. The discipline of sitting among others, in a space determined by others for a time period not decided on by me, just being silent - it fed my soul. The presence of the strangers around me helped me to the framework of stillness which my soul was craving.

Oh, my mind was still doing its hamster ball thing, aimlessly rolling here and there, running, running, running - but, actually, that was okay. I could just let it run its course of furry frenzy, smile indulgently at it, and keep sitting there - silent.

I did not come away from the experience with any profound insight, any solutions to personal, world or academic problems, or - as you can tell - the text of several perfect blog posts completely formulated in my mind. You see, that was not the point. The point of silence is not to come away with Something, although at times that happens, too. The point is to sit in Nothingness, in Silence, just for its own sake.

Silence.

Life, the Universe, and the Hamster Ball of the Mind. I wish you, for today, a space of Silence.

Book Walls

My computer is currently walled in by books. Lots and lots of books - fifty or so of them. And the desk is shored up by another dozen or more on the floor beside it. That's life in the grad school lane.

They're not all mine - some are (an ever-increasing proportion, I have to admit), but most of them are library books. I'm lucky enough that even though I live in a semi-rural area, I have access to the library of one of the biggest universities in Canada, which just happens to have a campus in town here. With the library card from my distance ed uni, the locals let me take out anything I like, and even send me books from the big city campus if I ask. And I ask - you better believe it. And then there's the public library, which netted me some couple dozen books for my research this time. It'll be heavy lugging taking all that stuff back when the time comes.

You know, I like real books. I enjoy reading ebooks on my ebook reader, when it's novels or short stories (like fairy tales!) which I'm reading for amusement. But for research, for non-fiction, give me a real book. For keeps, give me a real book. For looking up information, give me a real book. For knowing that I have the book in my collection - you know, when I run across that obscure reference to Andrew Lang, and I can say "Hey, I've got that on my shelf downstairs!" - give me a real book.

Real books are not dependent on electricity; if the power goes out, I can still read by candlelight. Real books don't suffer from file corruption or obsolescence - I got my copy of the Brothers Grimm in 1987, and it's still perfectly good, barring a bit of yellowing of the pages. On real books, I can stick sticky notes all over the margins, so I can find the quotes again which struck me while I was reading them.

And of course, real books make great walls around your computer. If I wasn't sitting in my office (aka bedroom) by myself anyway, I still wouldn't need a cubicle for privacy - I have book stacks to do the job.

Life, the Universe, and Grad School Book Walls. Better get back to studying.

A Different Kind of Remembrance Day

The last few years, I've made a habit of putting up a thoughtful post on Remembrance Day, a post reflecting on the past, on The War. To me, as I learned it from my parents and their generation, The War always refers to World War II. 1939-1945. As if there had not been any other war in the decades previously or since. The scars it left were so deep, even seventy years and two generations later they still hurt.

But this year, I don't want to talk about The War. Because this year, on Remembrance Day weekend, I was engaged in a remembrance of a different kind: I got to go to the 80th birthday celebration of a dear aunt of mine. It was a wonderful party: over eighty people jammed into her daughter's house, eating, talking, laughing, hugging my tiny little aunt who was walking through the crowd of her friends with a great big smile on her face...

Laughing - did I mention laughing? We laughed so hard we had tears running down our faces. Her four granddaughters put on a skit, poking fun at some of her traits. One of the girls acted "Oma", complete with her coat, slacks, shoes, the wig she wore when she had chemotherapy four years ago, and her thick German accent. The funniest bit bar none was when the play "neighbour" talked to the play "Oma", discussing her propensity for making friends with anybody and everybody (that very propensity which was responsible for the crowd of 80+ guests).
"I know you like getting to the mail box at the right time so you can talk to the mail carrier, don't you. You probably even know her name - what's she called?" says the "neighbour".
Play "Oma" replies: "Oh, her name is Jane!"
"No, it's not," interjects the real Oma quite positively, "it's Michelle!"

It was wonderful to celebrate the life of this little woman whose eighty years on this earth have by no means been easy. From having to flee wartime Poland as a child to a bout of cancer in her seventies which we all thought would kill her, through personal difficulties and health struggles, she carried on, and poured out love around her wherever she went. Some of that love was palpable in my cousin's house this past Sunday, flowing back in waves from her children, grandchildren and many, many friends towards this small, grey-haired, smiling person in the turquoise blouse.

It was a Remembrance Day of a different kind, and it was a great blessing to be part of it.

Noses

I was reading a fairy tale last night, "Prince Hyacinth and the Dear Little Princess". It's a story of a prince who has an incredibly long nose. His mother and everyone is shocked, but because he's a prince, they decide that nobody is allowed to point out to him that his nose is in any way unusual. They surround him with only people with long noses, always talk of his nose being handsome, make fun of short-nosed people etc., so he grows up thinking that his nose is normal and short noses are weird. Finally he falls in love with a short-nosed (or rather, normal-nosed) princess. She gets kidnapped, and he has to go find her, and for the first time in his life is confronted with people who all make comments about his nose. He doesn't want to accept that his nose is at fault, he keeps thinking it's everyone else who's off the wall with their comments and their silly little noses. It's not until his nose interferes with his pursuit of the princess (he can't kiss her hand because his nose gets in the way) that he admits that his nose is, perhaps, "too long", which breaks the spell; the princess is freed, he gets a normal nose, and all live happily ever after.

Now, today I had a conversation with some friends about kids with special needs. And suddenly this fairy tale popped back into my mind, and I got to thinking: I wonder if we don't do our kids, especially those with any disabilities (or diff-abilities, as it were), a disfavour by telling them that they're amazing and talented and can do anything that anyone else can do. Because one day they'll be confronted with "the real world" which will tell them that their nose is, indeed, unusually long - that they're not, in fact, "normal", and they'll find that their disability really does hamper them in what they might want to do, and they won't have the inner resources to cope with that knowledge. When you have a Prince Hyacinth who's been told all his life that he's the normal one and all the other people are weird, he's going to have a hard time figuring out how live in a world of short-nosed people. Of course, we want kids (or indeed, anybody) to be proud of who they are and have healthy self-esteem, but the Prince-Hyacinth-syndrome goes out the other end - he's deluded about his problem, doesn't know he has a problem, because his mother so carefully shielded him from it.

Now, to be honest, I'd prefer the ending of the fairy tale if his nose would shrink to median proportions, sort of go to a moderately-long-but-still-human size, instead of shrinking right down to being "like everyone else". There's nothing wrong with having a long nose, I'll have you know; I've got one myself (see?). But, you know - I used to very much think there was something wrong with my nose; I used to feel terribly self-conscious about it. Then one day a friend of mine, when I pointed out that my nose was long and had a bump in the middle, said "So what? I like it!" Reader, I married him (what else could I do?), and I haven't felt bad about my nose ever since. In fact, I rather like it because it's unusual (also, several famous Germans have had similar noses - Martin Luther and Albrecht Dürer, for one; also, Vincent Van Gogh, though he was a Dutchman).

But, you see, my schnoz isn't so big and bumpy that it gets in the way of what I want to do. Prince Hyacinth's, on the other hand, interfered with what he wanted, namely to snog the princess (who was locked up in a glass cage or palace, so he could only reach her hand - the details, as given by Andrew Lang, are a little murky). And it's when Prince Hyacinth says that "Well, it must be admitted that my nose is too long!" the spell snaps - both his and the princess'. She busts out of the glass cage, his nose shrinks to allow for adequate smooching (on the lips, no less, I'm sure, although Andrew Lang never says so, The Blue Fairy Book being a publication for children).

Admitting to our problems, even just to ourselves, can be the key to solving them. There is a line to walk between accepting our uniqueness, and closing our eyes to the issues that hold us back. True self-esteem sees our strengths and our limitations, and admitting to both is what lets us go to where we want to go.

Now don't anybody bring up Tristram Shandy - that is not the kind of nose this fairy tale is talking about. This is a children's story, people.

Life, the Universe, and Long Noses. And they lived happily ever after.

Autumn

I don't really have anything to say today, so I'll show you instead: pictures of a Canadian October. Autumn. You know, come to think of it, I like the word "autumn" better than "fall" (although I usually use the latter when I'm talking). "Fall" sounds you've just tripped and gone splat, "autumn" sounds so much more poetic.

Zucchini, spaghetti squash, pumpkins, and some kind of crossbreed which makes good pies.

Thanksgiving Turkey. That sucker was so big, the lid didn't fit on the roasting pan.

Those poor petunias, still trying to pretend its summer.

Rain. It's cosy inside on those days.

...but we've had sunny days, too. The brilliance of autumn colours is beyond comparison.

So there you have it: Life, the Universe, and My Autumn So Far. I do like this season.