This Winter of Our Pandemic

I’ve been telling myself this story, that it may become true. That this is the winter of my soul. (Maybe I tell myself that at the beginning of every winter). What is your winter story?

Anne Bogart: “I believe that how I describe my life matters not only to my own experience but also the experience of others. What is the story that I am telling? Do I choose to say, My life sucks?” Do I choose to say, “Life is great?” Or do I swing jaggedly from one to another? The choice — if I am lucky, rigorous, and attentive enough — is mine.”

So I repeat, what is your winter story?

“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.” — Richard Rorty

How to speak differently? How to look after your own winter soul, how not to damage the souls of others?

“For anything can happen and damage the most intimate life of a person. What will have been done to my soul next year? Will that soul have grown? and grown peacefully or through the pain of doubt?” — Clarice Lispector

I have been cataloguing in my diary, all the ways the last four months have changed me in good and bad ways. There are a lot of things that I don’t like, small granite-like changes. I’ve become hardened in places where I had worked to become soft. There are edges I’m not fond of. I’m in need of a re-mix. But I’m also done with letting people off the hook for bad behaviour.

From Hafiz:

“You carry
all the ingredients
to turn your life into a nightmare —
don’t mix them!”

and also:

“You carry all the ingredeitns
to turn your existence into joy,
mix them, mix them!”

Fernando Pessoa:

“To be great, be whole: don’t exagerate
or leave out any part of you.
Be complete in each thing. Put all you are
into the least of your acts.
So too in each lake, with its lofty life,
The whole moon shines.”

I’m trying to gather my ingredients from the store and from the cupboard. What do I have? I don’t want to leave anything out. The process needs be rigorous. It requires an intensity, a wholeheartedness, an attentiveness. Gift yourself these things. Put everything into the least of your acts, says Pessoa.

In One Drum, Richard Wagamese tells the story of a walk he took with Lorraine Sinclair. He says

“I wanted to do something vital about the issues surrounding my people.” But he says, “the big picture was enormous.” “We were walking by a river and I told her how discouraged I was. I told her I wanted to be a force for change. I wanted a better world, not only for my people but for everyone. She listened and walked silently. When we got to a small inlet cut out by the current she stopped and bent over to retrieve a pebble. Then she looked at me and smiled and I knew she understood I was sincere.

“This is how you can change the world,” she said and tossed the pebble.

It plopped into the water and we watched as the ripples spread out from the splash and ringed to the shore at our feet.

“The smallest circles first,” she said. “The smallest circles first.”

Richard Wagamese repeats: “It begins with a humble effort — the smallest circles first.”

How do you wish to proceed? I know I don’t want to argue with the world. I want to learn to speak differently. I want to make a humble effort.

I want joy rather than complaint. There’s a poem by Dorothea Lasky that begins, “Some people don’t want to die / Because you can’t complain when you’re dead.” Which always makes me laugh. I’m not above complaining, loooord knows. But I’m going to redouble my efforts to just work harder, instead. Which is Joan Didion’s advice:

“Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.”

Which shouldn’t be so tricky this winter of our pandemic.

Could our alone time also be a time to consider our energies? Could we imagine that we are alone together, as in this Cixous quotation, from Stigmata:

“Every poet’s words. 1. I am alone, you who are alone come with us, this will not break the solitude. 2. Whoever says, ‘I am alone’ breaks the solitude and affirms it by this act of speech.”

Cixous brings us to the line by Joyce in Ulysses: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.”

But then let’s wander back to Richard Wagamese who reminds us that everything is connected. The sacred breath joins us. If we leave fear behind, we can “change the essential way we view the progress of our lives.” The sacred breath “asks us to simply be happy first. It asks us to actively choose that, because choice, in the Ojibway world, is the spiritual action that sets all energy in motion. When we choose to be happy first, we can do anything, and we will have everything we need because we are already happy. That is the great secret that lies at the heart of humility.”

And then again to an Anne Bogart quotation you’ve seen here before:

“We are telling stories all of the time. Our body tells a story. Our posture, our smile, our liveliness or fatigue, our stomach, our blank stare, our fitness, all speak, all tell a story. How we walk into a room tells a story. Our actions relate multiple stories. We invest our own energy into stories.”

Telling your own story is not a passive affair but an active one. I think it starts by deeply questioning where you’re at right now, at least that’s been a catalyst for me. I want to get back some of the things I’ve lost. I want to winter better. More quietly, maybe, but with more intent, more rigour.