The rains of January fill the days with a slogging solitude. It’s common, really. The sun hides behind the overcast skies only recognizable by the ambient light it brings with a late start in the morning, and an early departure before 5pm. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, the clouds will break and for a moment the sunbeams will fill the dining room to bask the rear facing windows in Westerly gold.
Through those windows the steep gulley rises suddenly to meet our rear property. Hidden among the salal and blackberry thickets, some clearings pierce through the wilds to provide a semblance of order. Here, you can meet the forest and behold the terrain as it clings to the earth.
Rising up suddenly from this deluge are numerous madrona trees identified by their contrasting bark of gold and red. Unique to these are a trait where the majority of a madrona is near leaf-less and branch-less except for the very top. Non-deciduous by nature, their leaves are always green, but the tree itself requires a salty maritime climate to thrive. Some are new, some are old. The old ones are gray lifeless. Like large crooked canes they reach to the sky and have no leaves. Many have had their tops sheered off due to wind and time and stand like great thick sticks in mud.
These winter months tend to merge and melt together with only events to separate the time from week to week. Your sense of presence becomes distorted and compressed. Then, even as spring emerges, all memory of this epoch is shelved and a new season takes hold with instant benefits thwarting any thoughts of dismay.
And I remain, an observer to denote.
As my years roll on, I notice a kinship to how my brain works like these seasons. I compress monotony longing for a spark of life only to deride said opportunity because I’d rather dwell on its insignificance or shew it to the past thinking another will reveal itself. There will be other seasons, I say; other canvases; other days. And so, my justification turns to inaction creating a rot of living.
Is that harsh? Is it too condemning of my disposition? Perhaps, and yet I am an observer careening towards an empty end. Perfection has become my enemy. Why dream? Why hope? Why reach? A subtle depression, this mindset is relentless.
As I recall this madness, a small sliver takes hold. A speck of gold at the bottom of a forgotten barrel. I would not have found it without a total descent to the bottom. And yet, here it is, a radical and nuanced glimmer. I know what I must do.
I vow a reform to embrace the warmth of happiness. And not a faux whisper, but a total approach to stay true to the cause. I’ve feared this pursuit, because, like the onslaught of wild surrounding my home, I’ve denied my being thinking all is sabotaged in irony. But this is false.
The beauty of the winter isn’t the hope of the rise of spring, it’s the solemn desire to remain and refocus, to reflect and renew.