Winter
Interest
Rev. Mark
Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
1/7/06 & 1/8/06
Winter Interest:
Plants
that provide texture, color or other visual
effects through leaves, fruit, bark
characteristics and other means that enliven the
winter landscape.
“Other
seasons come abruptly but ask so little when
they do. Winter is the only one that has
to be relearned.” --Verlyn Klinkenborg,
essayist
Call to Gather Adapted excerpt from Verlyn Klinenborg’s
The Rural Life
All
of the days with eves before them are behind us
now for another year.
The
grand themes—rebirth and genial carnality—have
come and gone like a Chinook wind, bringing a
familiar end-of-year thaw to body and
spirit.
Now
the everyday returns and with it the ordinary
kind of week in which Friday doesn’t turn into
Sunday—and Saturday into Sunday—as it has
for two weeks running.
It’s
time for a week in which each morning throws off
a magnetic field all its own, when it’s no
trick telling Tuesday from Wednesday just by the
sound of the alarm clock or the mood of your
spouse.
With
the everyday, winter comes at last to the new
year.
And
in the midst of this wintertime, we gather
to reflect, to reconnect, to remember what it is
to be human.
It
is good to be together.
Reading
An
excerpt from “The Year of Magical Thinking,”
a book in which author Joan Didion recounts the
first year without her husband, who died
unexpectedly, just a few days after Christmas.
Didion
writes:
One
morning during the spring after it happened I
picked up The New York Times and skipped
directly from the front page to the crossword
puzzle, a way of starting the day that had
become during those months a pattern, the way I
had come to read, or more to the point not to
read, the paper. I had never before had
the patience to work crossword puzzles, but now
imagined that the practice would encourage a
return to constructive cognitive
engagement. The clue that first got my
attention that morning was 6 Down, “Sometimes
you feel like…” I instantly saw the
obvious answer, a good long one that would fill
many spaces and prove my competency for the day:
“a motherless child”
Motherless
children have a real hard time—
Motherless
children have such a real hard time—
No.
6
Down had only four letters.
I
abandoned the puzzle (impatience died hard), and
the next day looked up the answer. The
correct answer for 6 Down was “anut.”
“Anut?” A nut? Sometimes you
feel like a nut? How far had I
absented myself from the world of normal
response?
Notice:
the answer most instantly accessed (“a
motherless child”) was a wail of self-pity.
This
was not going to be an easy failure of
understanding to correct.
Reading
An
excerpt from My Garden Book by Jamaica
Kincaid
People will go on and on about the beauty of the
garden in winter, they will point out scarlet
berries in clusters hanging on stark brown
brittle branches, they will insist that this
beauty is deep and unique; people try to tell me
about things like “The Christmas rose…in
bloom in December is really very beautiful,”
but only in the way of a single clean plate
found on a table many months after a large
number of people had eaten dinner there; or
again they tell me of the barks of trees, in
varying stages of peeling, and the moss of
lichen growing on the barks of other trees and
the precious jewel-like sparkle of lichen at
certain times of day, in certain kinds of light;
and, you know, I like lichen and I like moss,
but really to be reduced to admiring it because
nothing else is there but brown bramble and some
red stems and mist… It is so willful, this
admiration of the garden in winter, this
assertion that the garden is a beautiful place
then….
But this is not true at all…I want to say to…[these
people]. This is just something you are saying;
this is just something you are making up.
I want to say that at this very moment I am
looking out my window and the garden does not
exist, it is lying underneath an expanse of
snow, and there is a deep, thick mist, slowly
seeping out of the woods, and as I see this I do
not feel enraptured by it. But you know,
white is not a color at all…white only makes
you feel the absence of color, and white only
makes you long for color and only makes you
understand that the space is blank and waiting
to be filled up—with color.
Sermon
Several years ago, when we lived in Chicago,
my wife was busy studying towards a degree in
landscape design. I’m grateful for this
time she spent at the Morton Arboretum, for
whatever I know about plants and gardens today
has been a by-product of her learning. As
I was in the midst of my own study to become a
minister at the time, I didn’t pick up as much
from her as I might have. Even so, a few
of the concepts and ideas were so striking to me
that I continue to reflect on their deeper
meaning. The theme of today’s service is one
such topic.
I remember Susan explaining to me the reason
she had chosen a particular plant for the
backyard of our two-flat apartment: “This
one will have especially good winter interest,”
she said. I thought she was kidding.
“Why would a plant be interested in the
winter?” I joked. She explained that “winter
interest” was how horticulturists describe the
appealing wintertime features of plant
material. Common examples of winter
interest might include a particularly attractive
or distinctive pattern or texture of bark…an
intricate lacework of branches…berries that
remain through the winter to provide little
dashes of color in an otherwise bleak landscape…any
feature that sets the plant apart from other
seemingly dormant plants…and that helps create
an aesthetic unlike what may be typically
noticed during the warmer months of the year,
when foliage or other growing things may cover
the feature up or pull attention away from it.
For people who are drawn to the natural
world, who find in the outdoors a place of
worship and admiration in every season, the idea
of “winter interest” may be obvious.
However, no matter how in touch I thought I
was with the earth at the time, when I learned
about “winter interest,” it was as if my
eyes had been suddenly refocused. I began
to regard the landscape differently, searching
for details amidst the white and gray of winter
that I had previously overlooked…or maybe
taken for granted. It’s not that I had
never seen these details before…. I just
don’t think I had properly appreciated
them. Tree bark, in particular, became
fascinating to me. Like wrinkly elephant
skin or tubes of intricate sculpture, the tree
trunks caught my eye…and my fingers,
too. Now, during my winter walks, I would
frequently stop to run my hands along the torsos
of the few trees in my neighborhood or at the
campus of my school, searching in the cracks and
crevices of their bark for the wisdom that I
believed must come from simply surviving winter
season upon winter season. Their bark, I
imagined, was one way they told their survival
tale, and now, more than ever before, I was
ready to take in what they had to teach.
My developing curiosity about “winter
interest” went beyond a new-found appreciation
for plants, however. By the time I
started groping trees, I had been deep into my
theological school studies, a time when I spent
most of my days groping for meaning. At
the heart of most of my school work were
questions rooted, you could say, in their own
winter interest:
What
does it mean to suffer, to experience
disappointment… heartbreak…loss…and still
go on living?
Upon
what can we rely when life gets messy and
painful, as it most certainly will from time to
time?
What
does it mean to be alive in the midst of death?
Of course, asking these questions is not
merely a result of preparing for the
ministry. Each of us, from the moment we
were first exposed to loss, and with each loss
that follows, has had or will have ample reason
to ask similar questions.
How
do we make it through the tough times?
What might be the deeper meaning in the losses
we endure?
Asking these questions, in fact, is one of
the distinguishing characteristics of being
human…it’s what sets us apart from the plant
world—the companions that may teach and
inspire us, but that don’t have to grapple
with the paradox of being alive while knowing
that they will one day not be. To be
human, it seems, is to yearn for answers to
questions that are, by nature, simply without
reliable answers.
Why
do loved ones die? How do we go on in
their absence?
The desire, if not the necessity, to wrestle
with these questions is similar, I think, to the
search for winter interest in a bleak January
landscape. The search may seem
unrewarding, if not futile. Indeed, the
suggestion that there may be beauty or
redemption found in our losses is only as
convincing as our perspective allows. Without a
doubt, the collapse of an important relationship
or the dismantling of our life as we expected it
to be due to abrupt career changes, unfortunate
or unhealthy choices, or just plain bad luck can
leave us disoriented and unsure of where we have
been and where we may be headed. In these times
of disappointment or confusion, whatever life
topography we had been following, even if we had
been doing so for misguided reasons or towards
uncertain destinations, becomes blanketed in a
white blur of meaninglessness.
How
could this have happened? Why do we even
bother to go on? How can we face the
future when everything can change in an instant?
Our most profound losses tend to arrive as
cold snaps, blasts of sorrow that threaten to
extinguish whatever hearth-light we had been
enjoying…or, sometimes regrettably, forgetting
or refusing to enjoy. In the bleak
mid-winter of our losses, then, no matter the
season against which they play out, we are left
to stumble around in search of
…the fruit still left on the barren
branches…
…the patterns of the
life that was, patterns that could continue
to
inform our living, even if only accessed through
memory…
…the signs of life that remain in
what feels like a world of death.
In our readings today we heard from Joan
Didion, whose book The Year of Magical
Thinking is a true gift of winter interest
to any of us who have struggled with the grief
that accompanies a significant loss…particularly
the death of a loved one. She spends a
good portion of the book considering the
question of self-pity: the tendency we have,
when confronted with death, to dwell on it…to
obsess about it…to wallow in what we have
lost. She writes of how we have been
encouraged to view this self-pity as something
to wipe away, to harden ourselves against, to get
over already. But writing from the
snow bank of her own soul’s winter freeze, she
concludes that the grieving rightfully have an
“urgent need to feel sorry for themselves,”
a need to indulge in some winter interest, we
might say…a need that cannot and should not be
ignored or taken away, for in the poignancy of
grief, it may be all we have.
She draws upon the reflections of C.S. Lewis,
who grappled with and wrote about the death of
his wife:
“I
think I am beginning to understand why grief
feels like suspense. It comes from the
frustration of so many impulses that had become
habitual. Thought after thought, feeling
after feeling, action after action, had H. for
their object. Now their target is
gone. I keep on through habit fitting an
arrow to the string; then I remember and have to
lay the bow down. So many roads lead
thought to H. I set out on one of
them. But now there’s an impassable
frontier post across it. So many roads
once; now so many cul de sacs.”
In times of loss, these roadblocks of memory
and habit leave us little recourse other than
self-pity. Didion describes this as “the
vortex effect,” the inescapable pattern of
remembrance that directs nearly every thought
back to the loss…and back to our aloneness…back
to our life, now frozen tight around the way
things used to be…and the way things can never
be again.
I, too, have grappled with the question of
self-pity, though I described it somewhat
differently at the time. Reflecting upon the
aftermath of my mother’s sudden death, which
occurred when I was in college, I noted a
tendency I had to see life as if it were a movie…a
movie in which I had become the star.
Everything that happened was about me and
everyone else in my life had become supporting
players, acting out scenes related to my family’s
grief. I immersed myself in the pain I
felt and left little room for much else. A
few years after her death, I had become ashamed
of this period of my life, wondering why I had
been so self-obsessed. Talking with a wise
friend helped me give myself a break. I
told him “I’m embarrassed that I couldn’t
see beyond myself…that I had to be the focus…that
I had to be the star.” He nodded and
then wondered aloud, “Don’t you think we all
may need to be the star sometimes?”
Don’t
you think we all may need to be the star
sometimes?
I’ve thought a lot about his words since
then…about the need each of us may have to be
the star of our own grief narratives…the
all-too-human need that actually legitimizes our
lives in the face of our losses.
The question of how we get through the tough
times remains, but one answer seems as clear as
any: maybe we do need to wallow in the
absence of life, to find a way to be enraptured
by our life’s garden even when it is blanketed
with death…even when the closest thing to
color may be a few scattered berries or a
coating of snow or the mist arising out of the
forest. Maybe life does ask us to take
some interest in the bleak landscape.
Maybe the absence of color is not only a
memorial to the color that was, but an
encouragement to the color yet to be found.
Last Sunday, I arrived home from church to a
house touched by the beginnings of a winter we
did not expect, an absence in the making.
Our beloved cat Esther, our companion and friend
for nearly 14 years, was struggling to stay
alive. Susan, doing her best to hold back
her sorrow, called out for me to come upstairs
where, curled up under a piece of furniture,
Esther was discovered, clearly in trouble and
fading fast. Within the next hour we had
taken her to the emergency room and determined
that it was time to end her suffering…a
painful and compassionate decision that was much
harder to stomach than I could have
anticipated.
After we offered our goodbyes and made our
way back out into the gloomy winter afternoon, I
was struck by how piercing the loss was.
We had said goodbye to an elderly cat. But
both of us had also said goodbye to a friend, to
a significant relationship, to an era of our
lives. We had said goodbye to a piece of
ourselves. The world was different without
Esther and it will continue to be. A painful
reality to face, but also a testimony to the
gift her life was to us and to the lesson
embedded in having to say goodbye to any loved
one…the lesson that life marches on, leaving
absence in its path, and that it is up to us to
honor and then to fill that absence the best we
can:
To know that it is ok to linger in our loss,
to not be so hard on ourselves when we feel like
a motherless child…or when we “feel like a
nut.”
To love despite the knowledge that our time
together is only temporary.
To find interest in the occasional winter of
our souls, as well as the summer…for each
informs the other.
And to appreciate each glorious and
pain-filled moment that we still have…
Moments to love, to lose, and to love once
again.