Winter Stillness

The interiority of winter is especially potent for me as I am a landscaper and I labor for my living during the fertile seasons. When the earth becomes frozen, and the trees and perennials dormant, I close myself up inside and write, languish over the fires my boyfriend makes for us, I cook stews, and read stories to my children. I sleep more and take walks in the snow (though this year there is literally no snow), and find myself in spare hours struggling with my fears or the remnants of old despair. It’s as if I don’t have time to meet that deep, questioning part of myself where lies the remembrance of doom, when I am in the motion of giving my all and believing, when the crickets are chirping. In the silence of winter, I grapple with the depth of my faith, and what I mean by doom, or by death. Certainly, in primitive times, having enough to eat and staying warm staved off death by cold, or cessation, and constituted success. We eat enough and are warm enough so I suppose I am succeeding. But, I have also not yet opened the doors I imagined I would, that would set me for life in happiness and prosperity. I do not yet own the land I want to toil on, and I have not yet built that home I’ve dreamed of since a child. Though, I admit I haven’t take a typical road to ownership, since I chose when I was a child to be basically a starving artist—a writer—and refused to participate in capitalistic society. The ironic part is that by turning away from it, I became one of its victims. I took a sort of vow of poverty, worked for the bare minimum and then spent the rest of my hours following the dark byroads of my subconscious and writing about it. Hand in hand with my conviction of being an artist was my intimation of the underneath, and a very disturbing, interfering, and eventually—I would realize—undercutting subconscious. (This is typical of the Sun and Moon square yet my situation has been exacerbated by the heavy presence of Pluto). I was the product of tragedy and bankruptcy, mostly unprocessed rage and repressed lust when I set forth from my childhood home which led me into reckless situations that I supported by continually signing my livelihood away with student loans I never intended to pay back, as I never intended to get a job. I lived only for the moment, back then. I realize now I harbored a deep death wish for myself which I was perpetuating with every step I took so that each journey ended in another downward spiral, toward the deep ice cave of rock bottom. It’s there, I discovered my essences and began to weave together my gifts through my chosen medium. That, maybe, is success. But my destructive cycles would always restart. I could never hold onto my life, or my loves. I used heroin to cope, or to disassociate, and also, because it is the drug of death. I never actually imagined I would live past 27. I figured my life would be caustic and explosive, artful and tragic, and, as an artist, I was satisfied with that, until I had a child.

Gardening, landscaping, working with the earth, that became the supplementary practice I could live with in tandem with my artistic practice, so as to root myself and my family down in some way. Children and gardening with the earth set me on the path of contrition and humility. My writing practice changed accordingly. Still, being a single mother and gardening for a living is not a position of affluence. Yet… I refused or could not bear to take the typical road, get a 9-5, partly because as a person of an exclusively Northern hemisphere chart (I have only read of one other—the eccentric Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys) I suffer if I cannot remain in my own head, my interior'; it is indispensable for my mental health. That I suppose is my excuse. As I write this I see how I still cling to my vow of poverty.

What is success? I have love, I live in a family where we are not walking eggshells around each other or continuously indulging in practices of avoidance (or in my parents’ case, alcoholism), where we know each other through and through. I survived, I re-emerged from cycles of death with my love of life still intact, that small flame we keep in ourselves still burning—as long as we are alive—our right to innocence. It’s that that creates even the possibility of redemption. I drowned my rage in the rivers I love now to swim in, I washed away the anger from my face and my shoulders, and started serving those I love, as I could, through my skills, cooking everything from scratch, teaching my children about the natural world and their emotions. In gardening, I get to serve too. I usually work silently, just with the plants. Sometimes, when the elderly rich woman who owns the land comes and directs us, I say, “I’ll get that done,” or “no problem.” She doesn’t know me, I maybe am even invisible to her. I suppose that is what I grapple with in winter, my invisibility. It does not bother me in summer when I have the light and the sound of the crickets. But in January I take stock of what is, and cannot deny anything. I become suddenly—in the month of Capricorn—a product of numbers.

So, in winter, I ruminate on my disciplines, on the life-long desire I have been harboring to bring to the surface the fruit of my strange path, of the dark-delving artist. In January I assess how far I have come. I have no choice but to scatter my losses of the previous year like ash, and gather what seeds are most potent for me at the moment to use for the new year. I try and hone them, whittle them down to pure essence so—during the delirium of warm months, fragrant blossoms, insects breathed en masse through the woods, the cry of peepers in the spring night and the drone of cicadas in the summer, the exhaustion of my work with sharp pruners and tree saws, my hands in the dirt, yanking out roots or setting them, dinners in restaurants of dragon rolls and miso soups, clammy with the sweat of love-making in the evening, and diving into rivers on my days off—I might not lose my focus on what my deep soul hungered for in the months of darkness and scarcity.