Restoration After Another Hard Year

December 13, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The past month has been challenging here, so a more meditative post today: a retreat into relative quiet after what has felt like too much noise.

Wally has been sick since I travelled to New England for a grade school class reunion more than a month ago, and multiple trips to the vet weren’t getting to the bottom of it.

It’s a constant burden when a pet or a child who’s living with you is ailing. They tell you how sick they are by how little they seem like themselves, or by how worried they look when they see your worry. Sick family members are also a lot of work.

“He looks pale to me,” said Dr. Niggemaier even though I’d never heard that said about a dog. Well the treatments (a lot of mine and several of hers) seem to be working—the burden of prior weeks released like a sigh—and I want to write about the break that I feel like having now that my insides are freed up again.

I want to pay attention to something that makes no demands for a change, that begins with relief and flows from there into a wider current that has been moving along-side the whole time but whose unfolding had become little more than a backdrop. What I mean is how week-by-week the Fall, this season we’re in had been slowly sliding into Winter without my even noticing.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Quiet, seasonal steps have weekly features, like the different expressions of a familiar face, their “right now” smells and sounds too, but I’d missed all of this (I wonder, did Wally miss them too?) and all I want to do right now is drift along in the inner-tube of that parallel flow. To advance the scenes that came just before today, and remember from prior years what might be coming up next. To feel the reboot of a deeper movement carrying me through to the end of the year.

It took me until February last winter, to write my first post of the year about rebooting and recharging. Today, I want to revisit that post (A Time for Repair, for Wintering), to consider whether “a Japanese calendar” that breaks the seasons into weeks can help with that kind of restoration, and finally, to take a stab at re-constructing the five weeks I just “missed” along with the three that are coming up before the new year in a bid to slow things down and return to better health.

_{Nestled in sod.}

For insulation or because they like the way it looks or maybe because it’s so deeply rooted in the ways they’ve always done it, Norwegians love their sod roofs—some so much that they’ve created their own human+natural landscapes.

Both like and unlike them, English writer Katherine May has brought a variation on that composite landscape inside. She discusses what the seasons have to tell us about the need to stop and recuperate from all the usual challenges. Her 2020 book, and the springboard for last Feburary’s post, is called “Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.”

For May, “to winter” is to learn how to flourish when times are lean, when we no longer have the spring’s freshness, the summer’s warmth, or the autumn’s harvest to fall back on—when we’ve been stripped down to the basics and our batteries have been drained of their juice. As she tells it:

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

“It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting….”

Too bad then that we seem to lack the evolutionary roadmaps to make ourselves stronger and more resilient by “wintering” in ways that the rest of Nature does. Perhaps that’s why her accumulated wisdom about time for rest and repair came not from preference but from necessity.

“‘However it arrives,’ May writes, ‘wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.’ In her own life, she needed to learn how to cope and then recover after waves of disruption roiled the core of her existence. (Her husband fell ill and nearly died. Her own health declined to the point that she could no longer work. Her 6-year old son became too anxious to go to school. Many of the things that May had counted on as a partner, as a professional and as a mother now felt “provisional and unsettled.”) In this ‘fallow season’ for her, May had to learn to admit the extent of her disorientation and unhappiness, and that validating these feelings neither encouraged them nor made them worse. Instead, by making a place for her desolation she began to learn how ‘to winter’ through it, something that the natural world already knows instinctively.”

For me, it’s not just Wally’s challenges that call for wintering. It’s the barrage of “bad news,” economic uncertainties, an annihilating 24/7 war, alarming politics, how much it sometimes seems that “the good times” are behind us. And as all of it has sanded me down, new demands arrive.

So when do I admit that it’s time for the repair shop?

When will I accept that my batteries only work intermittently, and one day may not work at al?

When do I: Stop, look, listen, (smell, taste, absorb and reboot) before crossing the tracks again?

_{My favorite thing about this picture: the two inward facing chairs.}

As a mindful reset to what can feel “like the fury of everyday life,” the Japanese (and the Chinese before them) thought they could slow the rush of time in a beneficial way if they broke down their annual calendars into microseasons. During the 16^th Century, some Japanese contemplatives broke the year down into 72 of these “5-day long seasons” in order (as they described it) to “soothe your passage” through the calendar “in a journey that draws your focus to subtle shifts of the natural world.”

They called these microseasons kō and instead of having names, each is described “in a mellifluous phrase” that aims to capture what is happening on the ground or in the sky outside in each 5-day stretch. “Bush Warblers Start Singing in the Mountains.” “Damp earth, Humid Heat.” “The Maple and the Ivy Turn Yellow.” “Dew Glistens White on Grass.” You get the idea. As described in a short (4-minute long) video, these mindfulness masters “found patterns in the cycles” within the seasons and “ways to recall them” so that when you finally slow down, life becomes a more satisfying journey “taken with much smaller steps.”

If this journey seems to have your name on it, you can take it exactly the way that the Japanese do via a free mobile app (for both iOS and Android devices). But just like the Japanese adapted what the Chinese had done before them, I’ve been thinking about my own house-in-nature adaptation this weekend, starting with the 5 weeks in November and December that I just “missed” and the 3 that are left before New Years—thinking that someday I might be able to conjure the mental images for all 52 of them.

Because I do a lot of my work from home, a place where my senses could be filled with the seasons (both outside and in) if I bothered to pay attention, I began with the role that its doors and windows play in this “slower parade of time.” With light pouring in from the East and the West as each day comes and goes, my work and living spaces function a bit like sundials, particularly as the leaves fall from the trees and new blades of light can angle in when clouds don’t get in their way.

Moreover, without the dampening effect of the leaves, sounds are different too—sometimes more grating (I get to hear a surprising amount of bad music blaring from passing cars) but not always. Sometimes it’s bird song, a distant dog, or gust of wind.

There are also environment changes inside when the heat comes on. Cooking smells linger a bit longer. Winter holidays bring visitors, with their new smells, sounds and feelings, and year-end transitions beckon.

So here’s what I’m “contemplating” today as I go back in time (to those “missed” weeks) and then try to recall what it was like here in prior years for those weeks just ahead of me. In doing so, I won’t even attempt to be as “mellifluous” in my phrasing as they are in Japan, except for that one week where their words instead of mine seemed like the perfect fit.

November 1-6

V’s of Canadian guess honk their ways through the mottled gray sky and, once in awhile, through the blinding sunshine as they depart the reservoir nearby, always aiming north by north-west.

November 7-13

This is the first week where the sun comes up on the same axis as our driveway, making the experience of walking down it (for Wally’s walk each morning) a little like being at Stonehenge. Fewer leaves interrupt the light at this point in the calendar, lengthening the shadows that seem to stretch behind us for 20 feet or more. I often close my eyes and let the sun warm my face when it’s damp and cold while trying not to trip as he pulls me along.

November 14-20

Dew Glistens White on Grass. (The first frost date in Philadelphia this year was on November 17.) We also don’t get much fog here, but when we do, this is when it first shrouds everything outside in a cloud before burning off later in the day.

November 21-27

The air inside is softened by small tubs of evaporating water that we put out to counter the drying effects when the heat “comes on.” At this time every year, our noses breathe easier with more moisture in the air.

November 28-December 4

The house next door has a ground crew regularly cleaning the leaves from their lawn, which makes it a verdant base for the golds and rusts of almost everything else. The walkway to their front door is flanked by two, twenty-foot, ornamental trees that are shaped a bit like tulip vases. This is the week that their leaves always fall down in a rush (like our gingko did after the first frost) leaving round skirts of yellow and red on a sea of impossible green.

December 5-11

Sun’s rising fills the top floor with light that glows so brightly that it bounces down the staircase, lighting the family pictures, certificates and pictures of friends lining the walls. It’s their week to shine down on the still sleepy floor.

December 12-19

With wreaths up inside, the house smells like pine—something that can last for weeks by misting them with water every once in awhile. It’s also when a little Christmas tree I made as a kid, our tin ornaments from Mexico, and the lights that look like chili peppers come back out like old friends.

December 20-27

One of the best things about living in these few blocks is that the bell tower of the school near-by tolls, sonorously, every hour, like it would in a small village before watches and phones told you “the time.” I listen for these bells all year long, but this is the week that another bell tower, in a neighborhood that’s somewhere to the east of us, plays short phrases that remind me of Christmas with its 5 or 6 church bells. Somebody in that tower keeps this over-heard tradition every year and I realize that I always look forward to hearing from them in this particular week of it.

So see how the light is streaming through your front door in a way it couldn’t manage for the past 42 weeks, or how the shadows play across your office at 3 p.m., or how chestnuts fill your house with fragrance when you roast them each year during the week of Thanksgiving.

They’re sensations that can return for as long as you want them to: details to mark the passing of time and to maybe “get lost in” as everything slows and has the space to repair.

This post was adapted from my December 11, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

A Time for Repair, for Wintering

December 13, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I live on a ridge that shoots in from the City boundaries in the northwest and descends, first gradually and then by leaps and bounds, as it reaches towards sea level in the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers.

At our point in this descent, a downward-sloping wind tunnel has been created so that the “weather” coming in from Canada and the Mid-West barrels through it, two or more times each year, snapping trees in its wake like match sticks.

In recent years, two of our trees have borne the brunt. A much-loved magnolia was simply uprooted in one barrage and, a winter or so later, the maple that had been its closest companion was essentially sheered in half.

Since what remained of the maple was pretty ungainly, I could have had it removed but then the most treasured trees on this plot of land—a huge American chestnut, a 200-year-old tulip poplar, and a previously-admired gingko—would have been totally exposed to the gale-force winds.

To begin to rectify the situation, I planted a hardy young silver linden near the spot where the magnolia had fallen, but it will be years before it provides much of a windbreak. So I’m also counting on the half-maple to do what it can, and I’ve been watching it closely–for several months now—as it works to repair and rebalance itself. Among other things, I’ve been surprised at how its “wounds” have closed, where it has decided to sprout new growth, and how it’s been “filling itself back in” from the half arm and lopsided “Y’ of a trunk that remained.

Despite a hard couple of years, there’s been something assessing and almost deliberate about its healing– like a self-powered erector set of verticals, horizontals and angles reaching again for the sky.

My maple-watching preoccupation probably explains my eagerness to read “Trees Don’t Rush to Heal from Trauma and Neither Should We” when this explainer of an article popped into my Short List on Twitter this week.

I wasn’t drawn to the take-aways that trees might be sharing with us (because I’m fairly certain that they don’t think about us enough to offer us much advice), but because of the title’s suggestion that trees decide not to rush when they’re recovering from calamity, that they take their time because they need to get it right. I wanted to know more about that particular drive.

The author, it said, was a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, more specifically of microbiology and molecular plant genetics, which made the piece even more promising. I was even undaunted when I learned that she’d written a book that someone at her publisher had decided to call Lessons From Plants, as if readers needed to be told about “what’s in it for them” in order to pick up this book. I would have gone with The Amazing Ways That Trees Survive and Even Heal From Trauma as a title—less anthropomorphic and more to the point—but anyway, the author’s name is Beronda Montgomery and she managed to pack several interesting insights into her fairly short piece.

Montgomery began by noting how the period of late fall and into winter may be the best time of year to observe the ways that our trees are resting up and recovering before launching a new season of growth in the spring. Particularly in deciduous trees—like our maple—“the carefully orchestrated process of leaf senescence begins [and] the hidden structures of trees emerge” during the late-fall and winter months. She continued:

During the autumnal senescence, the tree suspends active growth and recovers the nutrients of its leaves. This process occurs first by degrading the green chlorophylls that drive photosynthesis – the means by which plants harness light energy – and then converting complex compounds into soluble sugars and amino acids, which are banked over winter for use by the tree in the following spring. Once the nutrients are resorbed [I never heard that word before either, but it says exactly what it means], the tree begins to drop its leaves.

Once a tree loses its leaves (and the leaves of nearby trees are no longer cloaking it in shadow), tree-observers can also see how a tree has been faring in previous months from the abundance (or lack) of winter buds that have appeared, the proliferation of new branches, and whether the wounds that the tree trunks have suffered seem to be healing.

Montgomery says that the wound healing process, in particular, happens in two stages: “an initial, rapid chemical phase, followed by a slower, long-term physical adaptation.” In the first stage, trees produce phytochemicals with antimicrobial/antifungal properties that prevent disease from entering trees through open wounds, leading to eventual decay. After these defenses are mounted, trees begin to produce a soft tissue “callus” that hardens gradually over time. This several-month process keeps the wound free from infection while promoting oxygenation before it produces long-term, protective scar tissue.

It’s the slowness of the second-half of this healing process–all the time that the tree needs–that is most noteworthy to Montgomery:

Covering a wound prematurely simply to keep the damage out of sight, without attention to openly dealing with it through cleansing and therapeutic care, can lead to a festering of issues rather than a healthy progression towards healing, reformulation, growth and thriving.

That progression includes the slow restoration “of sugar-transporting phloem tissues and water-passing xylem structures” that allow a tree to continue to pursue its core purpose of photosynthesis while it accommodates environmental factors like the availability of sunlight, neighboring trees that are competing or cooperating with it, the available nutrients in the soil, and the other threats (like insect pests) that it faces.

You might call this progression “healing fast and slow,” the opposite of a band-aid over an injury before quickly moving on. In Montgomery’s “wound-healing paradigm,” while infection threats have to be countered quickly, repair needs to happen through cleansing flows of oxygen over extended periods of time, the very slow hardening of initially porous scar tissue, and the even slower re-building of core infrastructure.

Yes, it’s the horizontal, vertical and angling branches I could see in September but it’s also the slowly revitalizing engines of the tree trunks that are far more visible to the roving eye in the months of December, January and February.

There is a necessary time for repair, and in a tree it is measured slowly or the repairs won’t succeed at all.

Unlike plants teaching us lessons, perhaps the seasons and how we can learn adapt to them actually do.

On the backcover of Katherine May’s 2020 book, which is called Wintering, she conjures not the season but a kind of “respite” and “recuperative states of mind” that the season of winter teaches us something about.

For her, “to winter” is to learn how to flourish in lean times, when we not longer have the spring’s freshness, the summer’s warmth or the autumn’s harvest to fall back on—when we’ve been stripped down to the basics and must re-charge our flickering batteries. May writes:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting…

On the other hand, enabling healing and repair in ourselves can be easier said than done. Unlike a wounded maple tree that “knows” what to do “first” and then “more slowly and continuously” over time, we often seem to lack the evolutionary roadmap that can enable us to confront, repair and recover—that is, to make something that’s harder, stronger and more resilient than we had before in the “crucible” that May identifies.

For her, wisdom about wintering didn’t come because she chose to encounter it one day. “However it arrives,” May writes, “wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.” In her own life, she needed to learn how to cope and then recover after waves of disruption roiled the core of her existence. (Her husband fell ill and nearly died. Her own health declined to the point that she could no longer work. Her 6-year old son became too anxious to go to school. Many of the things that May had counted on as a partner, as a professional and as a mother now felt “provisional and unsettled.”) In her “fallow season,” May had to learn to admit the extent of her disorientation and unhappiness, and that validating these feelings neither encouraged them nor made them worse. Instead, by making a place for her desolation she began to learn how “to winter” through it, something that the natural world already knows instinctively.

May’s notion of “wintering through”—which she never tires of visualizing with the range of her poet’s eye—is what’s most remarkable about her book. The grounding metaphor not only separates a time of injury, respite and repair from healthier and happier times—a liminal season that’s entirely apart from the fatter ones that came before—but also activates the transformational qualities of inhabiting (and even mastering) the challenges of a place that’s as hard as this, at least when we refuse to deny its harsh realities by blaming ourselves for its challenges or attempting to sedate them away.

We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.

For this very wise person, wintering is a state where all of us will find ourselves eventually, and more than that, where all of us need to find ourselves from time to time in order to discover the native resourcefulness that we have to repair ourselves, to recover our footing and to evolve.

Wintering may be something we need to give ourselves now, when the ground outside is hard and the trees bare, or at some other time of the calendar year, but it can be confronted with greater hope given the familiarity and color that’s imparted in Katherine May’s deeply compassionate book.

Here is a link if you’re interested in a thoroughly enjoyable, hour-long conversation with May about the thoughts and experiences behind Wintering. And if you find yourself hooked, you can also listen regularly to her “Wintering Sessions” podcast. I think that you’ll find her voice to be a consolation worth marshaling for this time and for any difficult time ahead.

This post was adapted from my February 6, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Last weekend, on December 11, 2022, my weekly post revisited this discussion about “wintering” and added to it. If you’re interested, it’s called: “A Calendar with 52 Seasons.”

Restoration After Another Hard Year

A Time for Repair, for Wintering

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