In Ireland it is the weather that breaks our hearts. It is the floods that triumph. As they say, where I live, it is either about to rain or just finished raining, or else it is actually raining.
Rain is absurdly constant; whether it is there or not becomes the foundation of our mirth, our joy and fun and bravery. The brash confidence that other nations display, knowing the sky will remain blue all day, is not available to us. Although the monotony of sunshine can dull a people’s imagination.
But in Ireland the weather is capricious. It toys with us. Even on a summer’s day, when the temperature rises above 24 degrees for perhaps an hour or so, the nation closes down and becomes emotional.
We cease to function rationally. We gush on television about the wonder of a blue sky or how the light and heat might be an indication of the apocalypse.
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I’m at my best in winter, just before dawn. More so when the nights are long and sunlight arrives only after breakfast. I love to mooch around a dark house. I wait for the light, put on leg warmers inside my trousers and thermal vests inside my shirt.
I run the tap water until it heats up. It comforts my face and beard. I don’t splash myself with the ice-cold water.
Always vigilant for the light. It’s the most exciting moment in winter. Every day I wait in this darkness. I witness it, a grey formless hill or tree forming outside the window. Waiting for light to reach me is a sacred moment in my winter. Maybe it’s the most sacred moment in my life. And it happens every year.
It happens every day. Again and again light fades and darkness blots out the world as I imagine it. Then in the darkness the real world begins like a tiny flame of love in my heart.
[ Michael Harding: ‘Solitude sounds beautiful, but what you get is isolation’Opens in new window ]
When I suffered from depression about a decade ago, or from ill health that has manifested every so often since, I held on to my beloved, and that enduring bond opened for me a space every morning to re-create the universe. The radiant light in her whom I loved was not even a particular point, or source. But by the time she had left the room the light was everywhere. Spilling across the horizon, over the top of the mountain, and dancing on the lake water lapping in the distance, so that eventually God’s all-pervasive luminosity seemed to be everywhere, even under the bed and behind the sofa; light filling the world with love.
Love in dark times of depression or on such winter mornings can be a transcendent shining that defies reification; it cannot be objectified. Sunrays battling against a dark sky, bringing an ambient luminosity. This is a moment that every monk who ever woke to greet the morning understood as an encounter with the divine ground of being.
Why would I not rejoice in that? Why would I not embrace all the thermal vests and leg warmers in the wardrobe and run to kiss the long, dark nights and cold days, knowing that even the darkness of winter always yields to an inner light? An intimacy more intense than the kiss of the beloved.
And how many long afternoons have I relished that journey to the interior, wandering across the bogland of the soul, as I dozed by the stove? In that half-awake condition, at a kind of observation point, a peculiarly Irish form of meditation whereby you pay casual attention not to the real environment around you but to the landscape of your dreams. Sitting by the stove on quiet afternoons, allowing whatever thoughts, emotions, visions or phantoms float up from the dark like flotsam on a river. I am especially grateful when the cat joins me on the carpet for these afternoons of restful silence, with only the wheeze of a burning log in the stove, the fluffy suck of the chimney and the whining wind on the rafters to disturb my peace.
In winter I can let go because nothing can stop what is happening. No one can stop the clock winding down towards the zero of midwinter. No more than they can stop a person’s bones from ageing. Or hold the Earth still or command it to stop spinning.
As it spins away from the sun. Slanting itself towards the cosmic dark. I don’t even bother to cut the grass after September. I have forgotten about it. It stops growing. Then it turns yellow and lumpy. And the sun never rises above the trees after the autumn equinox and never shines on the lawn any more, which becomes a lake of shadows, and there is so much more water in the sky, and the rains flood the drains and gullies along the ditches and they overflow for days until the land is soddened, and I need boots to traipse through it.
The cats are anxious. They sense the dying sun. The loss of light in the backyard. The wilderness beneath the trees where once they played scratch and taunted the little birds above them. For them winter is like falling down a hole. They are bewildered. They stare out the window at shaken branches.
And for humans the passing days can be a gravity force that sucks the joy down to human boots and sends hordes of elderly people to the pharmacy for vitamin D tablets.
But I take my winters lightly, on the inside. I look out at the world and feel that the falling leaves are beautiful. How well they die. How elegantly they find flight on the back of the wind. The closing-in night is a blanket of comfort for them.
The flickering wood stove releases me from all looking. The darkness stops me from trying to perceive or worry about the birds outside in the cold.
I am in my nest. I stand my ground. I watch with my heart. A moment of gratefulness opens to me, as I consider that I might indeed be blessed with another year, another cycle, another summer to sit beneath the roses I planted long ago.
And I do indeed let go. From November onwards I surrender. And in that surrendering I find something delicate and delicious, an easeful acceptance of the dying of the world beyond the window in all its autumnal foliage. It’s as if I am with him, falling into the dark. We are both entangled in this winter, and that is truly exquisite. Death is not a lonely journey. In the dead of a winter night everything lies under a blanket of silence. I am bathed in silence. Wrapped in silence. Entangled with all that sleeps in the trees and under the ditches and in the attic.
The sun moves lower and lower across the sky at dawn, drawing me down to the ground. My bones creak as I try to rise from the bed. I am old. All summer I lived with more daylight than darkness and I took it for granted. Now I am on the threshold of the night – that black hole rising inside me though it will not swallow me. Because midwinter is a zero point, and from there I know that it will all begin again.
It is a child within who watches at the window these wonders of winter and rejoices in the stillness.
I am stepping away from the world in winter. Taking a pause.
Not just to be idle, but to create in the safe womb of my little shed, beneath the secure sound of my chiming clock, a pathway to the interior, to the snowy mountains of paradise, and to the boy and his teacher who dwell there. I sit at the window looking into the dark, weaving a love story by a fire in the twilight.
And it’s easy to sleep, even in the middle of the afternoon, especially after a solid lunch. It’s easy to hibernate for days without leaving the house. It’s even possible to greet sorrow with equanimity, no matter how it manifests – either as depression, bereavement, or bodily exhaustion. All these things are not just possible in winter but take on a new dimension because they dovetail with the season. Our melancholy is entangled in the space-time event we call winter. In winter people have permission to say, “I am tired now. And I am sad. I think I will lie down for a while.”
Such wonderful medicine it is to rest!
Such beautiful dreams arise when we take our place on the sofa with the cat! Like animals, we are exhausted. No amount of vitamin D will keep us going like a train. No amount of free sessions at the gym will keep us away from the fire or the armchair where we can just snooze.
Winter gives us permission to find the refuge where we can sip mugs of tea for an hour as if we were monks between meditation sessions. Winter allows the rosary beads slip through our fingers with ease and forgetfulness. Winter is a space where mantras or prayers or sacred words can fly out of our hearts like larks from their boggy nests, and the armchair allows our bodies a shape and rhythm wherein to dream.
It’s imperative that I never lose my delight in this winter wonderland. I hold it more fiercely than religious belief. This dozing in the half-light. This child within me. Because without winter I would not dream. I would suffer from insomnia. I would turn into a shark, unable to sleep. Unable to fall into the kaleidoscope of memory that dances in the dark. Without winter I could not doze to the soundtrack of a fire in the stove or know the sleepy afternoons as places where I wake inside my dreaming. Without winter I would forget who I am, because it is only in winter that I can experience the memory of summer, of who I was a moment ago. And such memories make for us our identity.
This is an extract from Midwinter: A Journey Through a Season by Michael Harding, published by Hachette Books Ireland
