Winter

Trying to adapt

Maybe creativity and imagination have always been human survival strategies.

The earliest versions of humankind needed to find ways to survive the darkness and cold of Earth’s winter, in Earth’s wintry places—to find hope—from year to year. So they made up stories to honor and celebrate the spring that inexplicably followed every seemingly endless winter season. Stories of a Sun God who lived in the sky, and stories of a god who lived underground where the bodies of their dead lay buried. Stories to placate the gods of the wind, rain, and sea whose power was so much greater than theirs.

For the first time in my life as a secular Jew, I’ve come to understand how and why so many people cling to the story of resurrection, of a being half-divine and half-human who would allow himself to be crucified so that all human beings—at least all those who believed in him—might live after death.

Here in the dead of winter in New England, I understand the appeal of this story in a way I never did before.

Humankind comes to storytelling naturally, as a lifeline that can keep us from drowning in the cold, dark sea of existence.

How did this very basic human survival strategy become a specialty practiced by only a small percentage of the species?

All of us have the DNA to be poets, to carry that torch through the darkness. To look as hard and long as we can at everything around us—to find and celebrate every speck of beauty and hope, every cause for shared laughter, appreciation, and love.

To cherish and immortalize all of it while we can.

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Lessons of Age

Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash

I’ve learned I must be careful with my hands, because the skin on them is like a cotton T-shirt washed so many times and worn so thin that’s it’s more akin to an insect’s wing than cloth—the plump, protective cloth it once was.

If I bump the back of my hand against any hard surface, it bruises like the skin of a perfect ripe pear. It goes in an instant from looking fine to looking ruined.

Even the slightest impact causes this to happen: a bruise the color of an eggplant. A bruise that takes a moment to form and requires days, sometimes weeks, to heal—days and days of feeling disfigured and self-conscious and ashamed about this clarion call from my otherwise fit body about my age. My marginalized status as someone undeniably old.

My salt-and-pepper hair, with its two partly hidden snow-white streaks, is a give-away I don’t mind giving.

But that eggplant-colored bruise on the back of my hand is a slap in the face each time, a reminder that the life in me is as vulnerable as the beating wings of a moth or a butterfly.

I hasten to heal it, every time it happens, applying ice and soothing ointments and promising myself to be more careful with my own fragility. But it’s true that a pear’s ripeness can’t be undone, and I know the skin on the backs of my hands will never again become the silky taffeta that once covered me everywhere, any more than an old T-shirt can go back to being new again after being worn and washed so many times.

That’s what death is, really, if we live to ripe old age: we wear out, eventually, no matter how diligent and disciplined we try to be. No matter how valiantly the heart beats and our souls sing.

The people who do it so beautifully—treasured friends considerably older than I am, who are nonetheless beacons of light. Who give and give and give. Who keep mining that ore of themselves and others for all the beauty they can find.

Each of them is a lighthouse for the fragile little boat that carries me.

Photo by Brahm Meyer on Unsplash

Scribbles from my journal today, while I watched the snow falling

So incremental, this accumulation,

flake by minuscule flake, like barbed words let fall

in moments of hurt and frustration,

Covering the grass outside and the leathery leaves

of the rhododendron--and even the treasure-trove

of next year's buds, their lush colors tightly wrapped

against the cold.

All of it, while I look on, turning lifeless.

The words I can't forget lodged inside me

like shards of ice.

I did not grow up with snow, and do not

know its ways, have no joyful memories

of sledding and no-school days.

It's a test for me, every time: Can I be hopeful

in the face of all these long dark nights,

the murky starless skies,

These days with so little light?

Photo by Balu Gáspár on Unsplash

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