The Spirit of the Season

Both Jazz at Running Scared and Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast have a posts this morning on the significance of the holiday season and I discussed it here a few days ago. I found this commentary, Hope amid the darkness in the Portland Oregonian this morning where Gail Wells does a very nice job of capturing the spirit of the season.

On a dark winter day I made myself get out of the house and walk up the road to visit the great blue heron in the farm pond. I'm always surprised to see this regal bird living so close, taking no notice of cars and farm machinery, going about its business.

The heron usually flies away when it sees me coming, swooping in a low circle toward the northwest. But today it stayed, standing on one leg, not looking at me.

Driving a graveled back road recently, I came upon a host of deer playing in a stubble field: an antlered buck, some does and two half-grown fawns. I switched off the engine and stared into the darkness at the deer jumping and spinning and do-si-do-ing on the grass.

Suddenly two does and a fawn broke away and darted across the road, blinkering past my headlights, headed for the brushy hillside. Who would have imagined deer dancing? But there they were.

Coyotes are convening in the woods above our neighbor's fields. They speak in a high keening wail, a spooky, unearthly sound -- yet what could be more earthly than a coyote speaking? Last night I heard yipping sounds again, but when I opened the door to listen I realized it was not coyotes but Canadian geese -- the sound was richer and more varied in pitch.

Every time I lift my head this winter, I see something unexpected and delightful. These animals with whom I share this land, they must always have been here, going about their dancing and singing and procreating beneath my distracted notice. But now, for some reason, I have eyes to see them, and suddenly the world seems alive with possibility.

Christmas, solstice, death-conquered, winter-vanquished, light-returning. A time when the sun pauses at the bottom of its swing, and just for an instant everything is stilled and everything is possible.

A time when what is dead is starkly and severely dead, "most sincerely dead," like the Wicked Witch of the East: the annuals in the garden, the last generation of houseflies, the old year, foolish innocence. A time when what lives, lives tenaciously and greedily: the leathery rhododendron leaves, the wriggling compost on the pile, bitter experience, absurd hope.

Religious people say God made us to be hopeful beings, which I happen to think is true but doesn't go far enough. It satisfies me more to think that hope is the evolutionary motif, the lyric of life encoded in human consciousness.

That's why evolution strikes me as being essentially a hopeful enterprise: nature constantly seizing on differences, choosing among the possibilities, trying new things, perfecting the fit, less interested in one solid certainty than in a universe of possibilities.

On a sleety day last week I took a break from Christmas shopping and stopped at a coffeehouse. Light glowed diffusely through the misty windows, splashing gold on the wet sidewalks, welcoming the traveler in from the dark.

I walked in, expecting nothing more than a cup of coffee and a chance to let some of the moisture steam out of my coat.

There was a little stage in the corner, and a string band was playing: two guitars, mandolin, hammer dulcimer and acoustic bass. The musicians had an awkward patter, with feeble jokes and much nervous laughter.

They hadn't been playing together long. The bassist could manage either the right note or the right beat, but not both at the same time. The dulcimer player bonged tentatively, chewing his lower lip.

The few customers chatted or read newspapers, mostly ignoring the band, although there was perfunctory applause after each song. When I heard the first notes to "Silent Night," I was surprised to hear the mandolinist call out, "Now, everybody sing." She must really be an optimist, I thought.

I couldn't hear any response as the musicians launched into the song. But their eager, hopeful faces stirred something in me, and, a little embarrassed, I felt my lips forming the words, "All is calm, all is bright." I sang softly, trying not to call attention to myself, relieved when the song was over.

"One more time," the mandolinist commanded, and I thought, all right, you want singing, I'll give you singing. I sang loud, not caring if anybody heard me.

It felt good to shed my public dignity for the moment. It felt good to open my everyday, buttoned-up, closed-in, embarrassed winter self to the hope that rang through this ragged music, to all the wistful, beleaguered, tenacious hope in the whole world.

Once we open ourselves to it, hope is an imperious urge, and I yield even when all experience cautions me not to. I am seduced by a glimmer of something beyond experience, something ungraspable but irresistibly stirring, pulling my imagination forward from dark December afternoons to the thin sunshine and wet promise of the spring equinox.

From her bio in the print version it would appear that Gail is a practicing Christian who is able to see the many facets of the season. This piece reminds me of something that one of my favorite people would have written, Henry David Thoreau.