A Winter Meditation

     The day is short and cold, and the sun is falling slowly behind the hills. There is just enough snow to be respectable without really having to go out and shovel. The windowpane, half-frosted, frames the winter landscape. The barren, stark branches of trees pattern the sunlight as it passes through them. A fire in the fireplace would be a good idea, but sitting here waiting and watching seems to be enough.

     Actually, this is not waiting. Since nothing needs to happen next, this is being and watching (and thinking). In moments like these, contemplation takes us inward, even as we notice that the sun has dropped downward a few more inches in the picture framed by the window. The light in the room begins to grow dim, but it is too early to turn on the lamp. This is not still life, just slow life. Winter is a season of contemplation as we are driven indoors by the weather and into ourselves by the mood of this season.

     Max Coots wrote, “No one says much good of Winter, except as something hard that exaggerates the Spring reprieve....” There is something hard and uncompromising about winter. The truth of this is distant from the vantage of the living-room’s armchair.

     This season offers several lessons for our consideration. As a symbol of death, winter reminds us annually of the inevitability of death. This is not a desirable lesson, but a necessary one. A major task of adulthood is coming to terms with death, our own and others’. It is something that many would just as soon defer to a later time, or perhaps choose never to deal with. Such avoidance invites us into the illusion of “as if:” “as if” neither we nor the ones we love will ever die. Ironically, such an illusion restricts the amount of freedom that we have. It allows us to treat life as being far less precious than it really is. We discount the importance of the moment, of living as deeply as we can. We discount the importance of taking the time to gaze out the window in winter to watch the sun setting behind the mountains.

     The second lesson of winter is the incredible power and resiliency of life. Beneath the face of winter, life plans its own renewal. The skeletons of trees, bereft of leaves, appear dead. To see the promise of life’s return, we need only look closely at the branches. The buds that will blossom next spring are already in place, waiting. Poet Mary Oliver suggests that life grows thin in winter, but endures. Perhaps this is the promise of immortality, not that we will endure beyond a certain number of winters, but that life will endure.

     Forrest Church observed, “Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” If that is true, then gazing out of this window is a form of prayer, a meditation on winter that seeks some wisdom. The sunset is all but finished as dusk darkens too soon into night. In her poem, Winter Evening May Sarton writes, “The fragile earth, the trees, all seem to shiver... / While people peer out just before they pull / The comfortable shades and shut themselves away / From all that’s ominous and beautiful, / From what they guess the night might have to say.”

     Though a thousand tasks call us away from the window, perhaps we would be wise to stay a while longer gazing into the beautiful, ominous winter night. The truth is that we have already learned all of the obvious lessons that life has to teach us. We linger by the window, to go beyond the obvious, to go further and deeper into the meaning of our own lives and life itself. One hopes that this will be time well spent.

Winter Landscape, photo by Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash