Thoughts on Being Cold
Spring Festival which typically falls during one of the coldest bleakest parts of winter, when spring is still months away seems like a kind of cruel trick played by the ancients. But it’s hard to see the humor when each tibia and fibula, each metatarsal, and tooth is chattering in the vain hope of generating some heat.
But perhaps this “spring” festival is meant to offer some kind of encouragement, like how the evergreen trees, holly wreathes and candles exist to remind us of the return of spring.
Traditional Winter has symbolized sleep, hibernation and death and in agricultural societies, winter was traditionally the time of rest time when people stayed inside and made quilts or did small repairs around the farm.
It can also be seen as an opportunity to take stock of ourselves, but at the same time the lack of social interaction and normal activity can be a stimulus for mental illness. One cannot help but think of the hapless family charged with taking care of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
Emily Dickinson, that mistress of the morose described aptly the effects of the weather on the soul:
“There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons – That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes.”[i]
Indeed, the waning light, the falling of leaves, the gradual shortening of the days, the disappearance of animals from the forest, all serve as a yearly reminder of the passing of time and the ticking down of our days on earth.
Perhaps it’s the faint notes of “passing” in the air, which induce a kind of depression or seasonal affective disorder. Cartoonist Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame puts a lighter spin on it positing it as the perfect weather for curmudgeons, “I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood.”
Indeed there is something kind of sweet about this melancholy, the contemplation, the seclusion. Winter provides us with a room of our own. American author and gardener Ruth Stout says it succinctly.
“There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you . . . In Spring, Summer and Fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.”
The excuse of cold weather allows us to fully indulge ourselves in a bit of pottering around the house, laying in bed or delving into the far corners of our library for a particularly obscure and dense book which has been left neglected through the busy summer months.
It is precisely this contrast which makes winter so worth relishing. Without the barren landscape would we be able to appreciate the lushness of summer? Winter is the “yin,” which makes the “yang” possible.
Would we appreciate the leaves so much if we didn’t see them transform from bare branches to buds, to bright young leaves and finally to shiny dark green forms?
Or in the words of Shakespeare:
“Winter, which, being full of care, makes summer’s welcome thrice more wish’d, more rare.”[ii]
American painter Andrew Wyeth, who had such a great influence on Chinese contemporary art, described it in terms of facial features:
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn’t show.”
This is an interesting conception. Rather than look at the loss of the leaves and the life, he views it as an opportunity to gain another view of the landscape – one which was previously obscured.
We have presented these works for you with very little explanation. Even though their meaning may be locked up like a leaf frozen into a layer of ice, we hope you can uncover their potential and allow their meaning to emerge.
Rebecca Catching
