Always We Begin Again

It seems cliche to write about the weather since small talk is not the normal fare of this space, but I don’t know how to talk about this without mentioning the weather.

It has been a full and bright moon here this week, which means it has also been a full and bright moon wherever you are too. But perhaps you do not have snow there, where you are, and something you should know is that when there is snow on the ground, it reflects any light in the sky and makes the inside of your home much brighter. This goes for the daytime too—right now the sun is staring me straight in the face (I like it this way) and our home is flooded with its warmth.

I am grateful for its warmth, though, because the temperatures have been below zero for the past week and a half. Sometimes they’re rising above that fat O but not for long. On Saturday, it was negative 17, but with a clear blue sky and brilliant sun, so we strapped on our new snowshoes and walked on the river for a while. It’s the first time I’ve been out on the river not in my kayak and even having my head a mere three or so feet up higher gave me such a different vantage point of the land around us and her inhabitants.

After more than a decade of living in a place where the seasons all felt different by the slightest degrees, it has been an adjustment being back in a place where every season is full of itself. When it is spring, it is muddy and light green and yellow buds popping out of bare branches with late April snow flurries. When it is summer it is pinks and yellows and greens and tomatoes and strawberries and kicking off your sheets at night to feel the occasional breeze of the oscillating fan on your hot legs. When it is autumn, it is golds and burnt oranges, the scent of leaves and the slightest chill in the air, putting on a sweater in the morning and shedding it by afternoon. And when it is winter, it is soups and chilis and long underwear and Darn Tough socks and tubes of chapstick and hand lotion. Every season is just full of what it is.

In 2020, our first year back in New York, I was so excited for winter, I pulled out the flannel sheets in October and my wool sweaters then too. I starting making warming soups and pulled my boots out. I glued myself to the windows waiting for the first snow and then tromped out in it whenever I could. But by the beginning of February, I was ready for spring. I kept looking and waiting and watching for the slightest sign of winter’s loosening grip. By March I put away my sweaters in an act of defiance and by April I was tempted to put some seedlings in the ground too early.

Last fall, though, on the autumn equinox, I realized something: Winter doesn’t officially begin until the end of the year, the 21st of December, a mere ten days before the start of the new year. The bulk of winter is at the beginning of the year, not the end. And I wondered to myself, why is it that when we name the seasons, we always start with spring? Is it because it is the time of new beginnings and everything feels possible and permissible? Because we would rather believe that newness begins when we can see it, rather than when it is dormant and covered over and seems like death?

Winter begins on the darkest day at the end of the year but she spends her bulk growing lighter and lighter through the newest days of the year. Winter is the real beginning, not spring.

I suppose that’s what someone who has just begun their 42nd year of life would say, rolling her eyes at those in the springs and summers of life when I have barely just begun my autumn. And maybe the analogy breaks down here somewhere. But a few weeks ago, when someone asked me to envision my life like a field—was it harvest time? Fallow? Dead or rocky? Planting time?—I said I felt plowed through, soil amended, and awaiting the farmer’s seeds. I felt fresh and possible. But not yet ready for sprouted greens to press their way through, not even ready for the seed to go into the soil and die its necessary death. I just felt dormant, but, like, in a good way. Like in a snow-covered field way.

In December we changed the way we spoke of the weather, stopped calling it winter, even when it grew chilly, even when the first dusting of snow came. And winter, when she came, as she always does, on that darkest day at the end of the year, felt like a new beginning again. In mid-March, when we have that one perfectly warm day and we go outside and breathe the air knowing spring is coming but not here yet, perhaps we won’t grumble as much when we put back on our sweater because it will still be winter for a little while longer.

Maybe this little adjustment doesn’t help you like it helps me, but it does help me. It reminds me that I am not in my end and that I am, as Saint Benedict of Nursia said, “Always beginning again.”* While it is true that the springs of our lives are full of promise and possibility, and the summers are full of bounty and lush with growth, perhaps it is the autumns and winters of our lives where the real growth—and by that, I mean of course, death—happens. And perhaps those deaths, as numerous as they are, are not the end of good things but the finalizing of finished things.

What I meant when I said I felt plowed and amended was that I feel emptied out of the pesky weeds that ate up much of my twenties and thirties. I no longer feel fueled by anger as much as by empathy (including, surprisingly, for myself). I no longer feel driven by success as by faithfulness. I no longer feel beholden to doing things because I feel guilty for not doing them, but instead as though being compelled by pure joy is a possibility in my future. I no longer put insane pressure on myself to please my perfectionism and the perfectionism I think everyone else has for me. I no longer feel like I’m missing out on something if someone important or someone I like or someone I don’t even like but feel like I should like does something without me. I no longer feel stolen from, but given to.

I know that all of those weeds and seasons were in some ways necessary for me, just as spring and summer are necessary to fall and winter. I don’t begrudge them, nor do I begrudge those still in those seasons. I’ve been there before and I know they will come through. That is the nature of a season. It doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t even last longer than the one before. It will end, and something else will begin. And then begin again. And again. And again. Because that is the way God made the world. And the way he made you and me and everyone we know.

*Technically he said, “Always we begin again.”