Still Sundays

Thoreau: Winter exists to see ‘what virtue survives’. Love like the sun doesn’t require convincing of its noteworthiness. The valor required for what comes in stillness.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

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I woke up this Sunday morning without the desire to pick any thoughts drained from the filter of stillness. I did not feel welcomed into the day  greeted by gray seeping in from every edge and angle of my bedroom windows. I don’t wear sunglasses when it is sunny; the bright whiteness from clouds hurts my eyes more, that’s when I wear sunglasses. But usually in the summer.

Summer.

This winter seems relentless. The Sun has broken through with some warmth on few days but they are too sporadic for recollection or a recess from lamenting the frozen circumstances. If I was in some well-maintained suburb of Colorado or a country farm without sanitation problems perhaps I could endure it all better.

But I am in New York City. The snow is piled on garbage bags that will not be picked up until the snow melts. It’s not even snow—it is some iron-hard deformity made of grime, man-ignored filth, soot, and concoctions of people’s pet excrement. It hurts to look down on the streets but look I must unless the risk of tripping over black-ice is worth the reality.

We are turned off and away from each other. I admire people who ‘laaaave‘ winter. But they hate summer so it evens out. More specifically, I am truly impressed by those who endure winter with grace as if it is an honorable walk to get to the hallways of breezy spring. People like my mother. People like Henry David Thoreau.

My mother is always reminding me to “not bring the cold inside.” She means it literally and beyond. My place is a warm, spacious  haven tucked away from cold, noise and the mindless chatter which demands headphones majority of the time.

Henry David Thoreau wrote in “A Winter Walk”:

The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact. Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rail, and the dead leaves of autumn, are concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it, and accordingly, whatever we meet with in cold and bleak places, as the tops of mountains, we respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness. All things beside seem to be called in for shelter, and what stays out must be part of the original frame of the universe, and of such valor as God himself.

In the winter, warmth stands for all virtue […]

How much more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life which still survives the stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and woods covered with frost and snow, sees the sun rise.

See what virtue survives…

How much more living is the life that is in nature…

See what virtue survives…

We are pathetic compared to nature and until we accept our place in this Design (with or without meaning) we will continue to suffer. See what virtue survives? Warmth within despite the harsh strength of what’s outside. And hope: this too shall pass. I want to remember every corner of this brittle winter so I will embrace spring and summer with a fervor reserved for a goddess.

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Speaking of warmth, nothing warms like love. Ah, yes, the hallmark holiday designated for love is next week. I have nothing new to add to thoughts on love that I have written elsewhere* except this: ‘Love is patient’; we are not.  Love remains even when two people can’t contain it. I feel arrogant trying to understand love. Having concluded that, I also know love, if it is indeed love, like the sun, doesn’t require convincing of its noteworthiness. Effort, communication and all those buzz words of new age and old age…sure, it demands all that, but convincing another that it is indeed Love and hence worth its labor, that it doesn’t.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “Love is like the sea. It is a moving thing.”  Best if people know if they are moving in the same direction before they hop on board the relation ship.

I have always referred to relationship as two distinct words. Ask anyone who knows me. Now I understand even more clearly as to why.

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Stillness peels layers of our understanding.

It requires a certain valor to meet all that surfaces in stillness and not run away in anger or fear. It’s a virtue to not hide but accept what is. Perhaps that is the the closest we can come to really living the life that is in nature.

Winter stillness provides dissolution of illusions. Good; I want the real thing and no less in spring and summer.

Until then…I take inspiration from the sun that rises without regard to winter, regardless if it can be seen or felt with its entire majesty.

*elsewhere, last year, I wrote about love—Bud on Love: How many loves in a lifetime?—in more detail. Most who are familiar with my writings, have more than likely come across it.

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