I have wandered in the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) for years, but never in the snow. By erasing the features of the farmland I’ve traversed for years, the snow this year exposed undiscovered vistas both outside and inside me. In the calm and silence, I wintered through a season of loss.
In her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May writes this about wintering, “It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can.”
Since November 2024, I have had to stare down some of the worst parts of my experience: the stunning election of a tyrant, the sudden death of a beloved pet, the conceded loss of a lifelong dream and upcoming total knee replacement surgery in March. In the midst of staring down all of this, I was also battling a serious depressive episode.
Over the last two weeks, all of these “worst parts” finally converged, and I have had to actively accept my sadness. I have had to allow myself to see it as a need. I could not have endured without the winter world of my beloved farmland.
When snow falls, nature seems to listen even more deeply.
“There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you,” writes Bernd Heinrich in Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. “In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.”
There is something beautiful about walking in snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes a lovely noise underfoot, like the air is full of stars in a quiet, calm world; a world in which I can safely winter and heal; a world in which I can savor belonging to myself.
While writing this post, I recalled this perspective from Albert Camus: “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
My favorite season is fall, so I’m counting on an invincible fall within me (not outside me!).
The deer in the fifth photo in this post actually let me get that close. I approached stealthily and silently, of course, but she did seem to be listening to whatever I was thinking before she bolted and four others bounded after her into the field in the second photo.
Beautiful reflections, quotations and photos on winter. I get so cold I miss what is inviting me. I am glad that there is landscape and soulscape to invite you to yourself in these difficult dark days. We both need all the help we can get.
Thank you, Charlotte.
I love the word, “soulscape” — that is precisely what my farmland has become for me.
A church. A sanctuary. A soulscape.
In what she calls the “Prelude” to her book of poetry, “The Unfolding,” Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer includes an excerpt from, “Concerning The Book that is the Body of the Beloved” by the poet Gregory Orr. Orr’s book itself, by the way, is one full-length poem. The excerpt;
Not to make loss beautiful,
but to make loss the place
where beauty starts, When
the heart understands for the first time
the nature of its journey.
What a beautiful invitation you have given to me and to all of us in your so-honest account of what you are experiencing these days. You have much to teach about becoming more attuned to our “vistas outside and inside” and about accepting our need to “safely winter and heal.” Your beautiful photography and language call me to new depths of awareness of what is going on within and around me. You also call me to a profound silence of accepting what is and learning to mine the depths of this reality and learn all that it might mean for me. This post is a lovely echo and affirmation of all I am reading in “The Unfolding,” and hearing it from you is a gift.
Wow, Carol. Such lovely affirmation. Thank you.
A confession: This post was originally going to be part of last week’s post, “Freeze the Day!” about my frozen washer water pipes; you know, kind of a ying-yang thing. But the more I pondered it, the more I realized that my winter wander land deserved more than to be a foil to frozen water pipes. So I scrapped that part of the post and over the weekend spent a lot of time pondering my wintering. This post was originally much longer, but I let much of it go, deciding that minimal reflections and the photography would give my wander land the space it had merited.
By the way, it was Charlotte who first introduced me to The Unfolding when she gifted me with one of its poems. It is a true poetry find.
Beautiful photos, thank you for sharing. I share your deep sadness and disappointment with my fellow Americans since November. I’m glad you are still seeing beauty and refuge.
Thank you, dear Neola. I know from your Facebook posts how sad, disappointed — and outraged you are by the dismantling of so much of what holds America and the world together. I worry sometimes that retreating to farmland is an easy escape for me; a way that I am sticking my head in the sand. But then I remember how calm I am out there; how peaceful and healing it is . . . and also, that walking out there is NOT easy this time of year. I hope my efforts can contribute, in some minuscule way, to fostering beauty and healing that can overshadow the darkness of our grueling days.
I started a long reply of praise for this post but lost it before posting the comment, which I forgot it wouldn’t save for me. So here is a shorter one. Your post reflects the beauty and peace all around me here on Salt Spring Island, BC, where 8 – 12″ of new fallen snow is all around us. The plows are out, so we are hopeful to get down the mountain we are on to fetch our grandson’s parent’s tonight at the ferry and get ourselves out tomorrow. But, such is the perfect peace captured in this post and our surroundings that I am not worried at all. Thank you.
So sorry, Beth. [A tip: whenever I write a long comment, I copy and paste it in an email to myself in case I accidentally lose the comment. That way, I have a copy that I can then paste into the platform.]
That being said, I AM SO SORRY that your thoughtful comment (and they are always thoughtful) was lost. Eight to twelve inches of new fallen snow! Yikes! You and Paul are adventurous so I believe that somehow all of your family members be reunited. May the peace of winter be with all of you. xoxo