Frohe Ostern!
Let me begin with a story.
Wednesday night was the night before *announcer voice* Lockdown NUMBER FOUR (four! four! four!) and I had to do last-minute shopping, due to my current inability to manage the schedule of the one person whose schedule I manage (mine).
Here’s the reason. I bought the first book in a series. The bookstore won’t open again until the 12th. So I either have to read really slowly, or order the next one from Amazon. For most people, ordering from Amazon is a hit of dopamine. For me, it is a possible conversation over the buzz-people-in phone that will be (1) garbled and (2) in German. Avoid, if possible. If I miss that conversation because I’m out on a run, it becomes a series of possible conversations with meine Nachbarn, whom I have never met. Avoid at all costs.
So on Wednesday afternoon, it’s getting close to closing time for the stores, and the wave of consumer panic is hitting a fever pitch before we are all thrown back into our hovels to wait for this surge of the virus to fizzle out. I’m sitting in German class and looking at the clock and worrying and wondering and no longer paying attention and dammit what if I finish that book and I might not even like it and then I’ll have to wait for another book to arrive and I just left German. I just left. I left the Zoom room, an hour premature. I went *click* and then there was no more German on my screen. (It is remarkably easy to decide to leave a meeting these days.)
I hustled to Thalia and found my book #2 and grabbed another just in case and spent twenty minutes mooning over all the new clean books. Books have become my dearest friend, and I will post on that another time.
I picked one up called “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.” Ha! Look at this self-help book baiting me, like it knows me. I put it down. I will not let the consumer market use this lockdown to take more of my money!
On the way home I flipped through Spotify and landed on a podcast interview with Katherine May, author of said book. I listened.
“Wintering” is a fallow season in which we withdraw from the world, by choice or circumstance. Think Julian of Norwich, or an extended hospital stay. Sometimes it is a retreat chosen or prescribed, like Jesuits in formation doing the 30-day “long retreat.” Sometimes it is a situation thrust upon us, due to the loss of a job, a break up, or a pandemic. It is a shift that creates a solitary situation defined by its lack of productivity. That is the point. That is, in fact, the work of Wintering. It is a pump on the breaks that shuts down the whole endeavor. And it is good.
It’s universal, historical, necessary, and unavoidable. Periods of wintering run anathema to the modern Western capitalist way of being, in which every place we stand must be photographed, branded and sold. Wintering sounds, to me, a lot like being a basket case. It’s sitting alone with the Sad. It’s staring out a window for an hour or a month and telling no one about it.
I walked down Landstrasse Haupstrasse, listening to the author of “Wintering” talk about this process. The host asked if there are any tips for how to deal with these Winter periods. Do you know what Katherine said? “NO WAY, BITCH!”
(She didn’t actually say that. She has the loveliest British accent and is very polite.)
But the point was the same: nope! There is no how-to book for how to survive a solitary season. There is no quick fix, no trusty guide, no expected movements. And that's the point.
Isn’t that kind of… nice? That there’s no self-help book for this? It’s almost… freeing. Like, I’m going to walk down a path that everyone walks, but I have to find my way. It’s my right. It’s my journey. It’s my story. I might see the paths that others have made along the way. But ultimately, I need to make my own.
What happens after a period of Wintering?
Creation.
The one thing you have to let go of, in order for Wintering to commence, is the gift that it bears. Thomas Merton knew this. Julian of Norwich knew this. Every Christian and Buddhist monk who gives themselves to contemplation knows this.
After weeks (months?) of letting myself give into the temporal needs dictated by grief and anxiety, I had an idea. I don’t remember when it happened. I didn’t have it, and then I had it, and the whole process stretched out before me, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
This idea lit a fire under my ass, and I have thought about little else for the past month. I’ve stayed up late and woken up early to give it life. It’s added direction to my days and hope to my heart. It combines all the things I love and many things I need. It is not this newsletter, though I believe they share the initial creative thrust.
If it works, it will sustain me, pragmatically, as I continue to chip my way up the mountain of this oddball, ridiculous, magnificent career in opera I am forging.
I decided to share it with the world today, my birthday, and Easter. It is the day the world is renewed and death is conquered. “Death has no more pow’r to slay. This is Resurrection day,” as we sing.
That is the paradox of Christianity: it turns death on its head. God goes through the shock of death, and abolishes it. I have never been closer to Easter than I was when I was lying on the bed holding the body of my mother in the hours after her death, an inverted pietà, the image bereft and universal. We are an Easter people.
Today, April 4th, I complete my thirty-first rotation around the sun, enter my thirty-second year, and release the decidedly unexpected fruits of my fallow season into the world.
You can check it out here: www.soulsingingcommunity.com
I am terrified that it’s silly, and immensely proud. People tend to approach wellness practices from the yoga side. I’m doing it from the trained musician side.
Cheers to Wintering, and the Spring that follows.