Margaret Atwood, “February”​

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning in the Burned House. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
 
 
Tamiko Beyer, “February”

I’m climbing out of this season, fingernails ragged, belly soft. I tuck a stem of dried mint behind my ear to remind myself.
 
Once, I bared my shoulders. The bottom of my feet roughed up the dirt with their hard calluses. When I harvested arugula, it smelled of green spice—alchemical veins pulsing sun and dirt and water. I do remember this. I pinned summer light up in my hair and made no apologies for the space I took up—barely clothed and sun-bound.
 
Now, a ball of twine in the grey sky. The sun rolls low on the horizon. Hangs. Then dips back down again, wind howling us into night.
 
Inside the erratic rhythm of this wavering flame, I conjure the potent sky of the longest day. Seeds with a whole galaxy inside them. Cicadas vibrating in the alders.
 
But the sensation of joy slips too quickly into simulacra. Song on repeat. I never meant to find myself in such a cold place, my hair thinning against winter.
 
Once, red clover grew thick where today’s rabbit tracks pattern the snow. Clover said flow, clover said nourish, clover said we’ve got this.
 
I reel the memory out, let it linger on the horizon, then reel it back in. I play it out and reel it back in. Some kind of fishing, some kind of flying—again and again. I loosen the buckles of my mind. I take up space in the precision of my breath. I call us all back in.

Copyright © 2022 by Tamiko Beyer. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 31, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            This is a big turning point! Halfway through winter, this week marks the very beginning of spring renewal. Neo-paganism, claiming to draw from traditions reaching back as far as Sumerian and Egyptian cultures, celebrates Imbolc (arguably from the old Irish, “in belly,” referring to the pregnant ewes). The Gaelic tradition of St. Brigid’s Day honors the Christian saint associated with fertility. Groundhog Day calls upon animal wisdom to intuit just how long the icy days will last. Maybe all this celebrating doth protest too much… February, the very heart of winter, sometimes feels like Atwood’s “month of despair,” and most of us relate to the big smoke signal of her last line, “make it be spring.” If that’s where the poem ends, it begins by rhyming “dead” “head” and “bed” and the wonderful, irreverent line, “Winter. Time to eat fat.” We can all relate to this particular form of in-belly-Imbolc, which Atwood shamelessly extends from a craving for vinegar fries to the notion of eating our own young.
           The repetitive, insistent striving for a hockey goal—“Over and over / again, He shoots he scores!”—models a hopeful, if desperate, scooping up of the life principle. Humor, irreverence, and reoriented priorities aren’t just respite from the gloom, but part of a staunch belief in the possibility of renewal. Not much is as simple and quick as the sudden lift we get from a laugh. Chuckling at a cat’s pink bumhole is a radical practice that enthrones life and love in the face of all the forces that drag us toward stagnancy right now. Atwood’s cat and Pennsylvania’s own Punxsatawney Pete are undercover agents of the life force, which is stubbornly building somewhere underground. We may all have, like the month of February, “a skewered heart in the center,” but it continues to beat. Political climate irrevocably screwed? Covid got ya quarantined? A good belly laugh scoops the Imbolc right up into the heart. It’s love, Atwood tells us, that does us in and by implication saves us (from eating our young among other things). We can still cling to hope, as she does when she commands her cat to make it be spring already.
            The current of death rising back up toward renewal is configured differently in Tamiko Beyer’s “February.” Instead of externalizing the life principle as an animal, she herself embodies a human-out-of-hibernation beast: “I’m climbing out of this season, / fingernails ragged, belly soft.” The stem of mint behind her ear “to remind myself” transports us along with her back to warmer times. Spring starts in the roots: feet, dirt, and arugula’s “alchemical veins / pulsing sun and dirt and / water.” Deep down in the veins of the earth, underground interactions of sun, dirt, and water are creating new life. This elemental alchemy is central to Chinese medicine, in the transition from winter, governed by water, to the wood element of spring seeds and saplings. Wood stands in not just for vague hopes and dreams taking shape in the manifest realm, but also stands for the very principle of expansion and potential.
         The poem’s form mimics the way the stubborn, halting life principle is striving to expand and rise, continually swatted down by frost. After the introductory stanza about emergence and memory, each stanza takes us through the swing between past and present. Beginning with one word that throws out a marker of time like “Once” or “Now,” each section throws out some warm-weather phenomenon to be reversed by winter: “I pinned summer light up in my hair” becomes “in such a cold / place, my hair thinning / against winter.” Or winter hopelessness is reeled back in, as when rabbit tracks in the snow yield to the memory of red clover, murmuring hopeful encouragement about flow and nourishment and grit. We rise and fall with each stanza through “sunbound” summer memories reaching upward toward the “potent sky of the longest day,” down via the low, hanging winter sun that “rolls low on the / horizon” and “dips / back down again.”
            The final stanza of “February” offers a meta-reflection on these reversals, capitalizing on Beyer’s image of the sun as a ball of twine. Here at the end of the poem the metaphor appears fully developed: “I reel the memory out, let it linger on the horizon, then reel it back in. I play it out and reel it back in. Some kind of fishing, some kind of flying—again and again.” The “erratic rhythm” makes sense now: Beyer’s poem instantiates a kind of parabola, where an object thrown out against gravity returns in a symmetrical curve. 
          Maybe the parabolic line (a fishing term) is useful for thinking about the dip-and-rise of fishing for hope this month. After two springlike days, it’s snowing outside my window as I write this. Grr. The figure of the parabola is a nice way to imaging our actual breath, bringing the poem’s abstraction into concrete embodiment. We cast the breath out and draw it back in. This rhythm of breathing is the truest moment-by-moment tether to the life principle. The comforting cadence rocks us like the soothing words of Beyer’s red clover: “we’ve got this.”
 
 
PRACTICE
            How might we facilitate the returning current and, in Atwood’s turn of phrase, “get going / on a little optimism around here”? I think of the much-quoted line from Wendell Berry: “practice resurrection.” Here’s a resurrection practice for stimulating the parabolic turn in the energy system, dipping down to rise back up like Beyer’s fishing line. The Returning Current acupressure point relates to Hexagram 24 of the I Ching, which describes a turning point after a time of decay. Banished light returns. There is movement without force. The old is transformed and the new is introduced. Also known as Kidney 7, this acupressure point helps the downward energy turn around and ride back up toward the torso. Related to the power of rebirth, the physical point is used to stimulate childbirth. And isn’t the crowning of a baby’s head the perfect manifestation of spring, new life emerging from the mysterious darkness of the birth canal? Stimulating this acupressure point, about two thumbprints up from the inner ankle bone, might help renew the feeling of upward current. As you tenderly knead this spot, you might visualize loops of breath around the torso, inhaling from the pelvic floor up the spine and around the top of the skull, like reeling in the thread of energy, and exhale it down the front, as if playing out the fishing line again. 
            *Also* you might just need the remedy of laughter. I hate to say locking into a screen counts as embodied practice, but if you can’t watch a cat (or some other living thing you associate with the life principle), you might hunt for a few funny online videos of your favorite creature to study its magic. Does this beast have a superpower that might help you through the last bitter weeks of winter?

Yehuda Amichai, “A Pace Like That”​
I’m looking at the lemon tree I planted.
A year ago. I need a different pace, a slower one,
To observe the growth of its branches, its leaves as they open.
I want a pace like that.
Not like reading a newspaper
But the way a child learns to read,
Or the way you quietly decipher the inscription
On an ancient tombstone.
And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do
as it rolls its way from Genesis to the death of Moses,
I do each day in haste
or in sleepless nights, rolling over from side to side.
The longer you live, the more people there are
who comment on your actions. Like a worker
in a manhole: at the opening above him
people stand around giving free advice
and yelling instructions,
but he’s all alone down there in his depths.
​
“A Pace Like That” from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, copyright © 1996 by Yehuda Amichai. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press Books.
 
 
Joy Harjo, “Speaking Tree”
I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree.
--Sandra Cisneros
 
Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken--
A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there--
 
Some humans say trees are not sentient beings,
But they do not understand poetry--
 
Nor can they hear the singing of trees when they are fed by
Wind, or water music--
Or hear their cries of anguish when they are broken and bereft--
 
Now I am a woman longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth
Between sunrise and sunset--
 
I cannot walk through all realms--
I carry a yearning I cannot bear alone in the dark--
 
What shall I do with all this heartache?
 
The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway--
To the edge of the river of life, and drink--
 
I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:
 
Imagine what would it be like to dance close together
In this land of water and knowledge. . .
 
To drink deep what is undrinkable.

From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo. Used with permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
 
 
Danusha Laméris, “What Trees Dream Of”
This one thinks, let me be the slender bow
of the violin. Another, the body of the instrument,
burnished, the color of amber.
One imagines life as a narrow boat
crossing water,
a light mist of salt on the prow.
And still another— planed down to planks,
then hammered into shelter
toices vibrating through the rafters.
We do not notice their pleasure,
the slight hum of the banister
beneath our palms,
The satisfaction of the desk
as we tap our pens, impatiently,
upon its weathered surface.
They have ferried us
across rough seas
to lands that smelled of cinnamon
housed our senators,
who pace the creaky floors, debating,
carried arrowheads to pierce our enemies.
We have boiled their pulp, pressed it
into thin, white sheets of paper
on which we describe all of the above in great detail.
And when we die
they hold our empty forms
in bare cedar
until the moment—and how they long for this,
when we meet again in the blackened soil
and they take us back
in their embrace, carry us
up the length of their bodies
into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves.

Danusha Laméris, “What Trees Dream Of” from The Moons of August. Copyright © 2014 by Danusha Laméris. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Autumn House Press, autumnhouse.org.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            The Jewish New Year of the Trees marks the revival of nature in Israel, falling on the Hebrew calendar somewhere between late January and early February. The reason I’ve chosen it for our focus this week—besides the fact that there ain’t too much happening in the long, cold soup of January—is because we would do well to take our cue from an ancient faith that has managed to enliven a holiday to match our current ecological crisis. To be clear, nobody said Tu Bishvat is a major Jewish holiday. The holiday has created an environmentalist buzz globally, adopted across the diaspora as a day of agricultural awareness and tree planting. The needs of our planet beg us all to resist capitalism’s extractive approach to the earth and rehabilitate our intimacy with and reverence for nature.
            These three tree poems offer a range of modes of imagining the interrelationship between humans and the natural sphere. Although Yehuda Amichai is perhaps the most celebrated Israeli poet globally, “A Pace Like That” is hardly the most obvious choice for a reverential poem about a tree. Its frank, un-precious style underscores that Amichai is very much a secular poet. Nature here provides a practical model for human behavior: the speaker simply wishes to mimic the slower pace of his lemon tree. But there’s a slip-slide between the sacred and the profane: trees model a way of being whose slow deliberation is likened to the care we take with sacred things. Not the perfunctory daily flip of the newspaper, but the deciphering of an inscription on a tombstone. Not the troubled movement of rolling from side to side in our sleep, but the deliberate slow unraveling of a Torah scroll over the course of a full year.
         Then Amichai flips the script with his final metonymic link: the secret underground force of renewal and vitality coursing through the tree’s roots is like… a worker in a manhole. He fuses the quotidian—the people above him who “stand around giving free advice / and yelling instructions”—with the profundity and solitude of the final line: “he’s all alone down there in his depths.” In a glorious upset of our expectations for attributing soul wisdom to natural forces, the mysterious workings of nature are compared to the methodical, practical, skilled industriousness of a manual laborer.
            Compare this way of modeling human behavior after the livelihood of a tree to the mutual push me/pull you of Joy Harjo’s “Speaking Tree.” To speak the language of tree (which for Harjo is related to poetic language) is to understand the longing not only to root down but also to move. To hear the singing of trees is to understand yearning. But the human “longing to be a tree, planted in a moist, dark earth” first appears as the inverse of what trees long for: “The deepest-rooted dream of a tree / is to walk.” This dream, as Harjo translates from tree speech, is to walk not as a human walks, but away from the human: “even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway— / to the edge of the river of life, and drink.” So the animism expressed here doesn’t show nature mirroring human emotion, but instead longing for independence from the realm of people to get closer to some primordial source. Unlike the human longing for tree-ness, conveyed in the epigraph quoting Cisneros—“I had a beautiful dream I was dancing with a tree”—the trees dream of dancing with one another: “Imagine what it would be like to dance close together.” Free. 
            According to Danusha Laméris, trees dream of something different. “What Trees Dream Of” is the very opposite of Harjo’s animism, where the natural realm craves its freedom from humanity. Laméris’ trees dream of nothing but humanity. They want to be our musical instruments, our boats, the beams that construct our shelter. The desk is satisfied with our tapping pens, the banister loves our sliding palms. In the form of benevolent protectors, they ferry us around and provide the material on which we write our histories. This comforting view of parentified nature reaches its apex in the poem’s glorious ending, about endings. Trees, in their afterlife as coffins, embrace the human corpse until there’s an elemental co-mingling: “and how they long for this, / when we meet again in the blackened soil.” These lines bring humanity into a deeply corporeal union with nature that is also transcendent, as the trees take us back, embrace us, and “carry us / up the length of their bodies / into the glittery, trembling movement of the leaves.” Here in the dead of winter, I like this tree dream of becoming a kind of posthumous human humus.
 
 
PRACTICE
            Perhaps to find our own animistic intimacy with the natural surround, we could revisit our broken genealogies for older ritual systems that regard trees with reverence. Are there approaches to trees as bearers of the numinous? Tree ceremonies for quarrel settling. Divining rods. Hearts planted in acorns. Griots in baobabs. The shunned oak. Perhaps we could all dip into a little research on how animism shows up in our ancestral histories and devise our own tree ritual this week!
          Alternately, you might revisit your personal history and call to mind your very favorite tree. What were the contours of your relationship to it? The birch tree grown from the spot you buried your first dog denotes one set of relational properties and powers, the huge pine whose branches held the tire swing another. Still another set of powers are to be found in the protective dark of the Japanese maple screening your windows from the world. Whatever you value in and draw from your tree friend is a good place to begin building your personal version of the numinous. In meditating on this, you could jot down a word description of the tree, or write your tree’s history, or a fairy tale where the tree is the protagonist.
         Or perhaps try to embody this tree, envisioning the central axis of your trunk, the rising sap, the symmetrical explosion of roots below and branches above. If you were to breathe like a tree, would you inhale from the foundation of the body that’s rooted to the ground, upward to the glittery, trembling leaves of uplifted fingertips, with the exhalation drifting down all around you? Or would the inhale pull from the skin of the scalp to feed some central ring deep in your trunk and then radiate out in every direction? 
         Whichever exercise helps you concretize what you value in nature, what would integrating those needs into your daily life look like, and how can you commit to establishing a practice around it?

Y'all, I just couldn't figure out a way to make a video of a cold shower without getting sued. So here's a photo of my last polar bear plunge. Ever!

Jane Kenyon, “Taking Down the Tree”​

“Give me some light!” cries Hamlet’s
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. “Light! Light!” cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it’s dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.
 
The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother’s childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.
 
With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.
 
By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it’s darkness
we’re having, let it be extravagant. 
“Taking Down the Tree” by Jane Kenyon from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon. Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 
 
 
Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man”

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
 
And have been cold a long time 
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
 
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
 
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
 
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Source: Poetry magazine (1921). This poem is in the public domain.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            Christmas wraps up somewhere between January 6th and 19th, depending on where you are. Some places celebrate Three Kings Day, marking the visitation of the Magi; others focus on Jesus’ baptism. Even though most Americans don’t observe Epiphany, in the second week of January any small American town will be littered with mangy discarded trees by the side of the road: not-so-evergreen needles, residual tinsel or none. Something about this speaks to the psychological moment of the season. Earnest New Year resolutions clash against the holiday hangover. We dip into the leftover spice cake, reencountering the annual defeat of sudden transformations based on a randomly designated date on the calendar. After and in spite of all the shiny wrapping paper and blinky lights, we are faced with stark, barren reality: cold, darkness, solitude, and nature’s death. Acknowledging these winter realities requires a different spiritual skill set. For some of us, it feels like permission to release. We can let go of the ruse, among other things, and quiet the clamor toward something that is simply not there—at least not right now, in the dead of winter.
            Hamlet’s Denmark offers an apt psychological setting for early January. Jane Kenyon nails it. “Taking Down the Tree” takes us down into the Shakespearean closed world: maddening mental solitude, excruciating bereavement, cold betrayal, loss after loss, and a darkness where “even the moon / shines with only half a heart.” We are, for sure, taken down. The “closed world” is the term my father coined for the tragic corollary to Northrop Frye’s “green world.” These two paradigms are so user-friendly as to have been employed to describe contemporary phenomena as diverse as Cold War political discourse (in Paul Edwards’ book The Closed World) and digital bot taxonomies (in Mark Sample’s blog, samplereality). What’s recognizable, aside from any religious framework, is the closed world’s inward spiral imploding toward oblivion, a nightmarish perversion of cozy winter hygge. The movement of Kenyon’s poem from a desperation for light to the delicious ending—having extravagant darkness for dinner—is like the release of the insistent, exhausting cultural expectation for an optimistic holiday disposition. Slowly, piece by piece, like the “tick tick tick” soundscape of needles falling off the tree, we let our need for light fall off our shoulders and fingers and feet. I like to reverse the syllables of the word, and think of needles backward, as “less-need.” Dropping my need. To do, to change, to strive, to shine.
            At the same time, Jane Kenyon’s whole poetic oeuvre is a fight for optimism. Kenyon’s brand of depression is a furious, doomed hunt for light, especially in her late poems, which scour reality for any tiny quotidian detail with the potential to fend off despair. In “Notes from the Other Side,” she describes God as “mercy clothed in light.” “In the Grove: The Poet at 10” depicts a kid so worked up by the battle between the sun and a cloud as to feel a violent joy “hard to distinguish from pain.” That’s a pretty good description of the feeling state of Kenyon’s poetry. In a section of “Having it Out with Melancholy” entitled “Once There was Light,” Kenyon visualizes herself as part of the human family in the form of a “speck of light in the great / river of light that undulates through time.” But melancholy descends on her and yanks her out of the “glowing stream.” After this, she weeps for days. Sometimes divine light only appears in Kenyon’s poem as some kind of joke, as in “Dutch Interiors,” where the Holy Ghost only appears on gleaming cutlery or pewter beakers of beer, leading the poet to decide sourly that “Christ has been done to death / in the cold reaches of northern Europe.”
            And so we return to the frozen north of “Taking Down the Tree.” Our own desperation for light and change in midwinter is as fragile as the flimsy pasteboard case that holds the Christmas ornaments. And yet, in spite of their delicacy, the tin-reflected lights and ornaments reappear each year: the spaniel marked “My Darling,” older than its owner, and the jumping jack that survived dismemberment. They are testimonies to the durability of the memories we move “from house to house.” We handle them “with something more than caution”—perhaps we could call it reverence—then tuck them safely away again till next December. The tin-reflected lights and idiosyncratic, storied hanging objects are just markers—symbols of our stubborn, renewable hope. Christmas is made of our longing, and the echo of it remains like the residual scent of balsam fir, the actual earthy substance from which the little jumping jack was made.
            The ornament never falls far from the tree. I inherited from my mother a worldview I find in Kenyon’s poetry, characterized by a simple and definitional state of yearning. Some might call it depressive, particularly if they were fond of Melanie Klein. The first real theological battle with my father, at the dining room table when I was a tween, was about Milton. Not yet thirteen, just tasting the fruits of independent thinking, I wanted to defend the choice to pick the fruit. I argued that humanity only fully became human when we acquired separation from the divine. At thirteen, I probably didn’t reference Michael’s promise of a “paradise within thee, happier far” in Book 12 (12.587), but I think of it now. I still think that longing for contact with the divine creates the internal ethical and spiritual compass that defines our humanity. The human condition is literally woven out of yearning, a truth I could feel in my bones, even (and especially?) at that age. My dad countered with some very Christian interpretation and stormed away, which was anathema to his so-very-sanguine character. 
         But what’s remarkable to me is that the next day my father, knowing that his green world was not mine, gave me Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” I can’t afford to reprint this poem, but man oh man, the extravagance of its theology! It’s not an existential declaration about human potential in a godless world. It’s not about humanity bowing to a higher power, be it God or Nature, or reflecting its power through art. The “plungings of water” are meaningless in and of themselves, Stevens tells us, and the “high horizons” with their mountainous distances are merely theatrical. The poem’s scope is wider, encompassing a merging and a transcendence “beyond the genius of the sea,” beyond “the outer voice of sky and cloud,” beyond “the heaving speech of air.” It’s about the alchemy of longing, the melding of “the ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea” with the person singing to it, creating a sublime universe larger than both. The (feminine, my father would point out) mortal not only expresses but creates a whole world out of longing, spoken in “the dark voice of the sea.” The poem not only asks, but self-referentially remarks on its repeated asking, “Whose spirit is this?” The woman singing fuses with the originary Word of creation, as the chaos of ocean and deepening night organize themselves to become “the self that was her song.” I remember how my father would watch my mom saunter off alone to walk by the sea. He wasn’t part of it, this union, and he watched from the beach with a version of Stevens’ reverential wonder: “As we beheld her striding there alone, / Knew that there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”
            Stevens’ complement to this seascape of a woman entering the heart of longing is “The Snow Man,” a man entering the emptiness of cold. This poem is a celebration of “a mind of winter,” a perfect illustration of Stevens’trademark stance on the role of art (“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”). Instead of superimposing human notions of misery onto the cold or the sound of wind, we are encouraged to practice being “the listener who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and nothing that is.” This decimation of the self, of imagination, and of our personification of nature relates to Stevens’ negation of transcendence in “Sunday Morning,” which places Jesus within “the heavenly fellowship / of men that perish.” There is no beyond. Stevens’ winter mind finds expression this second week of January, exploring the porous line between pain and violent joy: in the cold reaches of Hamlet’s Northern Europe, folk celebrate Epiphany with ice swimming.
            Wim Hoff, known as “The Ice Man,” used cold exposure as a remedy for grief as his wife spiraled deeper into depression. As the darkness permeated her psyche, he says in his book, he moved his four children closer to her family to get parenting support. He was leading a trip in the canyons when she threw herself from the eighth story—freeing her from her demons, he writes. Hoff is not sure whether he was healed by his children or by the cold water that led his mind to stillness and functioned as a mirror to face himself. Anyway, that’s the context in which Wim Hoff’s school of cold exposure was born.
            I was born into a family whose genetics are riddled with depression and whose New Year tradition is ice swimming. Each January my daughters and I choose whether to join the ice swimming contingency. I’ve always felt torn. As someone who finds a way into spirit via the senses, I want to celebrate this gritty and stoical approach to pain and mortality. I do think, as Hoff claims, that the experience helps us enter deep parts of the mind. The cleansing rush, the feeling of total renewal, the symbolism of starting fresh in a culture sorely lacking in rituals with a physiological component—how can one resist? And it does seem logical that sensory extremes train us to withstand suffering. But might they teach us, instead, to transcend it? Is this alleged entry into the belly of what-it-is-to-be-mortal just one more version of spiritual escapism?
          As my teenage daughters wrestle with the epigenetic demons I gave them, it seems more courageous to prioritize quieter, humbler holiday traditions. We find new lights at CVS to replace the broken ones, then we pull from the flimsy cardboard the three matching red balls with our names written in gold glitter script, knowing that the fourth is hanging at their dad’s house. The glitter catches the light from the replacement strand, and inevitably I cry, and nowadays they know I’m crying. There is sorrow in the hanging of stockings, and we hold each other through it. This is grit.
 

PRACTICE
            Maybe we should just end with the fact of the sun’s return. We could simply remind ourselves that the light is increasing, a few minutes a day. Maybe what’s required to keep falling in love with life is out there. And for those we love, for the world that’s such a mess, we have to keep looking for it. What brightens us from the inside so that we might better help each other through the dark? I want to make an argument for a cold shower. Don’t close the book—just hear me out! I’m not asking you to Wim Hoff your way up Mount Everest in your small clothes. But the benefits of graduated cold exposure are not just scientifically proven, they are palpable with just one taste. If, part way through your next shower, you turn the water cold for just a few moments and then try it again after just a couple minutes, the second time feels so much easier. Compare this to most meditation strategies, which are for many people torturous for a significant period of time before sitting begins to actually feel good. Or the excruciating time it takes for foam rolling and massage ball mushing and Bengay burning to create any change at all. But in just one shower you can feel the changes in physiological processes like circulation and cortisol level. There is a palpable letting go, which seems to be the theme of January. Google the benefits of a cold shower, and just consider it, okay?

IF ANYONE KNOWS WHO CREATED THIS GORGEOUS IMAGE, PLEASE CONTACT ME SO I CAN IDENTIFY THEM!!! 
This week I recorded a guided meditation (please note this is an AUDIO FILE, not a video). Please click below to listen: