Winter’s Grace: Crystalline Gifts of Self-hood

By Courage & Renewal Facilitator Paul Michelac

December in my house is the month of garden and seed catalogs. And when they start arriving I know the winter solstice must be near. I like looking at the colorful flowers, especially as I gaze out across my snow-filled backyard. It is fun, in an escapist sort of way, to mentally melt the cold and frost and see tulips and daffodils. Eventually I come to my senses and honor winter and its gifts as much as I look forward to spring and turning the flat pages of colored ink into three dimensional living and growing plants.

I live in Colorado where winter is typically the season of cold, snow, and unexpected mountain blizzards. My personal and professional winter mirrors the natural world and is the season of chilling realizations of unmet dreams and sudden losses. If I can, I’ll avoid winter with all kinds of professional distractions. Yet the Courage tradition reminds me that winter is necessary and, like other seasons, has a gift to offer. I need only look to the natural world to know this is true. The tulip bulbs I planted in the fall are resting under the snow, and without the time to harden-off they may never emerge into their full potential.

Let me offer you a chance to reflect on winter where you live and examine what opportunities it may offer you for understanding the metaphorical winters of your personal or professional life. If we were on a Courage retreat I’d invite you to go outside, because nature offers us the opportunity to see the questions we are struggling with in novel ways. So, grab your coat and get out into winter for a 15 to 20 minute walk, preferably in a place you know fairly well. As you move about, open up your senses, and look for newness in the winter world. Try slowing your pace so as to more fully mark and appreciate the changes you notice. Find a place to sit and scrutinize your surroundings. What is absent that you know was present in the summer? What is visible that you didn’t realize existed before? As you begin seeing winter with new eyes, are you gaining any new insights or understandings into your professional winters? On my nature walk I noticed that ground frost can lift a rock out of the soil. This offers me some hope that maybe the frozen ground of my professional winter will lift a problem I’ve stumbled over, up and out of my path.

I’ve been thinking of winter and its gifts recently because of May Sarton’s poem, “Winter Grace.” I invite you to take her poem with you on your next walk and read it while listening for nature’s reply to your deep questions of selfhood.

Winter Grace

It is autumn again and our anxiety blows
With the wind, breaking the heart of the rose.
Petals and leaves fall down and everything goes.

All but the seed, all but the hard bright berry
And the bulbs we kneel on the earth to bury
And lay away with our anguish and our worry.

It is time we learned again the winter grace
To put the nerves to sleep in a dark place
And smooth the lines in the self-tortured face.

For we are at the end of our endurance nearly
And we shall have to die this winter surely,
For this is the end of more than a season clearly.

Now we shall have to be poor, to yield up all,
With the leaves wither, with the petals fall,
Now we shall have to die, once and for all.

Before the seed of faith so deep and still
Pushes up gently through the frozen will
And the joyless wake and learn to be joyful.

Before this buried love leaps up from sorrow
And doubt and violence and pity follow
To greet the radiant morning and the swallow.

May Sarton , from Collected Poems 1930-1993

What images and phrases speak to the condition of your soul, immersed in the season of winter? The first stanza immediately captured my attention. As an educator I think of the pedagogical blizzards that can strike. The once flourishing garden of my teaching suddenly withers. Maybe I spoke too harshly to a student. Maybe I underestimated the complexity of an assignment. The bitter wind of my anger or fear blows through my classroom, sweeping all away. It seems that nothing is left except loss, separation, and silence. Everything that I thought I knew about myself or about my professional identity falls away like rose petals after a hard frost. What about you? Do any experiences come to mind when you think about something in your personal or professional life being stripped bare by winter’s icy winds?

Returning to the poem, I notice that Sarton moves through loss and begins the very next stanza with a sliver of hope: “all but the seed, all but the hard bright berry…” For me, winter’s grace is captured in the thin white space between “everything goes” and “all but the seed, all but the hard bright berry.” I hear in that eternal moment of silence the necessary and natural pulse of pain, disappointment, and loss. This is winter’s grace, the wisdom of letting what needs to die within me (false hopes, ill laid plans, misperceptions of self, etc.) pass away. Now I am ready to glimpse with crystalline clarity the nature of my inner-self; the “hard bright berry” that Sarton writes about. In what ways have your personal and professional winters brought you to a clearer understanding of your soul (Sarton’s “hard bright berry”)?

When I reflect back on my coldest professional winters and the gifts that followed, one story comes to mind. It was in the winter, January in fact, that my wife and I decided to move from New York State to Colorado. In order to make this move I resigned from my job as a college professor. It was my first academic position and I loved it, my students, and my colleagues dearly. Stepping down was the right decision, one I’d make again; and the grief was real, too. I arrived in Colorado without a job but a desire to work again in academia. As I remained unemployed my winter deepened and I began looking beyond higher education for work. With each new want ad and failed interview I asked myself deeper and deeper questions about the quality of my gifts and talents. With each cycle of rejection and reflection, I began to see with greater clarity, nuances of my true self that I’d overlooked. This was winter’s gift to me.

As I thought more about winter and Sarton’s poem, the following images came to mind: a night sky studded with stars, a biting--all present--cold, snow that squeaks under the soles of my boots, a desperate attempt to preserve my body heat within layers of clothes, a walk across town to a local tavern, brightly lit windows steamy on the inside, the joyous sound of laughter condensing on the glass and running down in rivulets of community. Winter is also the season for gathering together in warm places and telling stories. What stories would you tell of your winter learnings around the hearth fires of your professional world? Where do you and your colleagues gather to share the grace of winter? Maybe it is around the water cooler, or the drafting table, or the boardroom, or around CAT Scans depicting the ravages of cancer.

Winter, by its very nature, is difficult. And it seems that in its hardness lies a very precious gift that Sarton describes in “Winter Grace.” I invite you to look for those seeds of understanding that are waiting to push “up gently through the frozen will.” When you have a good story to share, invite someone out for a cup of tea/coffee and describe what you’ve uncovered of your joyful awakening into yourself.