It snowed again last night. Wind buffets the trees so they scrape against the house and rattles the windows in their frames. The sky feels gloomy and gray and a little melancholy as we approach Winter. I did some Christmas shopping yesterday- purchased yarn to make scarves. Knitting is something I’ve wanted to learn how to do for many years. My grandma taught me how to crochet when I was 10 or so. I created one long red chain of stitches before the bag of yarn was lost somewhere in my adolescence. I associate knitting with an ancient craft and am pleased to have finally learned how. I’m proud of the two scarves I have knitted and marvel at how simple it is. While shopping yesterday, I noticed scarves and hats and mittens in dozens of storefronts and several times I paused to look more closely, to count the rows of stitches, to imagine what size needles were used.
Learning some new skill always has this affect on me. It changes the way I perceive the most simple objects. After spending a Summer day with friends weaving baskets from reeds soaking in buckets, I now appreciate the skill, the patience, the devotion it takes. When I see a basket sitting under the tree at Christmas or piled high with magazines next to the couch for pleasure reading I marvel at it and not just the contents it holds; a basket is no longer just a container or a decoration. New eyes. I have new eyes for woven baskets and knitted mittens.
Motorcycling has given me new eyes, too. Because a motorcycle is a vehicle without doors, a floor and a roof, a motorcyclist remains connected with his environment rather than secreted from it, as in a car. A rider sits within the scene rather than viewing it from behind glass as an observer of it. There is an immediacy to life when riding. I feel part of what is happening around me rather than removed from it. One evening riding home from work, I was stopped in traffic directly in front of someone’s home which sat just a few yards from the curb front. I struck up a conversation with the homeowner while sitting on my bike. This sort of interaction just doesn’t happen in a car, or when it does the nature of it is entirely different. I’m asking directions rather than just engaging someone who is nearby. There’s a barrier to the outside when traveling by car. There’s a barrier between me and life.
Winter sometimes feels like a barrier, too. I’m stuck inside the house, trying to stay warm. Winter can feel like punishment- each snowstorm brings one more sidewalk shoveling spree. It brings out boots and jackets and layers of clothes to insulate me from the cold. It brings sadness that many weeks of this will follow before I can ride again. I am facing and feeling the furtive aspects of Winter. Snow is falling again now as I type and the furnace is blowing - obscuring the sounds of the outside world, the world outside my windows, outside the house. We have short days and long dark nights. I miss my motorcycle. I miss feeling part of the action around me, part of the city I drive through, part of the lives of the people I encounter on the road. It will be April before I can ride again, before I can connect again.
There are beauties and bounties to Winter and it is tempting to write about them, to offset the depression hovering near, but this would be an attempt to feel my way out of the darkened room in which I find myself. Perhaps Winter in Michigan brings me gifts with this introspection. Perhaps there is something I can gleen from the quiet days secreted in my room with books, journal and pen, needles and yarn. Perhaps there is some good that happens when I draw inward and hunker down for the Winter. Am I like the trees, this way- shedding my showy leaves and burrowing roots deeper into the ground? Perhaps this reflection is a way of preparing for the next Spring’s growth.
What Winter does for me each year is to bring questions. It brings questions I’m not ready to face that feel uncomfortable with their weightiness. What am I here for? Why do things happen as they do? What is the meaning in all this?
I will start my new job on January 3rd. My current job is ending after a tumultuous year. A year in which I had to fight for autonomy, fight to be heard both in my local clinic site and as a member of the organization. I am glad to be leaving this job. The leaving is filled with questions though- why was I in the post for such a short time? What lead me here and what was the purpose of the position? What was it supposed to teach me about myself? I want to learn what I can from it and move on without repeating mistakes. I want to know what parts of me made the job intolerable, not just rail against the people I worked with or the organization.
Part of what hampered me in my current role is the expectations I had of the organization. It has as its mission to protect and serve the reproductive rights of women. It has, until recently, provided those services at costs that allowed everyone who needed reproductive health care to get it. I believed in the mission and the power of an organization whose dedication to women is renowned. I idealized it, I martyred it. In some ways then, it could do nothing but fail me and I it. I am glad to be leaving it behind and with it, the frustrations and criticisms. But as I leave, I recognize the questions sitting here with me. Am I giving up by leaving? Am I quitting before I’ve done the work of trying?
Even as I write out the questions, I know the truth for me. I know the work of the job was in trusting me and my judgments, not in trying to manage how to live within that system. But I know where these questions are coming from. They are coming from ideals that I was ingrained with. Ideals instilled by my family and culture to be loyal and committed. To sacrifice, to serve others, to be selfless. To make it work. These are external ideals and the events of the last few years has provided me with opportunities to see if I want them to be mine, too. At some point I have to choose what kind of rules I want to govern my life, what philosophy supports me and my living.
I’m raising far more questions today than I am answering and this makes me uncomfortable, antsy and anxious. My house is calling out to me to care for it- dishes and dusting, organizing and arranging. Perhaps I will pull out some Christmas decorations, fill the house with mirth and merry. But I know I will need to leave room for these questions, to sift through them, let them simmer. I am committed to myself this Winter. To knitting and writing and dreaming about riding. I will honor myself and my moods, gray or merry, and the questions that arise from them. I will hibernate with all these questions and plan to treat them as Rilke directed in his Letters to a Young Poet:
“have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves…Don't search for the answers…because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps… you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
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