• About Me
  • Title Page

The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: December 2013

Dressing Warmly

24 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Tom Cooper in Mindfulness, Seasons, Winter

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Mindfulness, Seasons, Winter

I’ve written here already about my dislike for how young people lately refuse to dress warmly. Even on the coldest day, you’ll see kids standing at bus stops in short sleeves, no jackets. In stores and restaurants you’ll find them in short pants and flip flops, as if it were July and not January. It bothers me because I think this represents a sense of spoiled entitlement. I don’t need to dress warmly—everywhere I go should be heated to a toasty temperature, and I expect to do any traveling between said blast-heated environments in similarly cozy vehicles. If one of those vehicles breaks down, I am armed with a smart-phone to summon aid, which I believe will arrive long before I have to do anything as drastic as stepping outside for an extended period, say, more than two or three minutes.

Given this somewhat judgmental opinion, I was surprised recently to experience my own lessons in dressing warmly. Where I live now I have much more opportunity than before to get outside. Tending to our pastures and feeding the horses, sure, but I also have more time to just walk in the woods, to explore the hills and valleys and the creek beyond our front yard.

Very early on Sunday morning I was out. It was a cold morning with intermittent snow flurries and an icy mist. Ice had formed on the grasses and the smallest branches, lending everything the fleeting, magical look of a crystal palace. As I walked I gazed around me, looking for something new or surprising, listening for birds. After a while I was distracted by a cold breeze blowing down my neck and I raised up my collar and zipped my jacket higher. I was wearing boots, jeans, thick gloves and a warm knit cap. I was well dressed and I could easily focus my attention on things around me, rather than shivering and worrying about keeping warm.

That’s a lot of what I did last year, in my first winter out here. I’d go to the barn to do some chores, or out to the fields to take care of something, or just want to take a walk in the woods, and I’d find myself wishing I had worn more clothes, a hat or gloves or just a warmer coat. These things didn’t matter in the suburbs. I’d go out to take a walk, find that it was colder than I had suspected, and I’d turn around and head back inside. After all, it’s not like I was going to see or hear or experience anything new, walking from one cul-de-sac to the next. Maybe somebody would have gotten a new car, or put up a new basketball hoop. Wow! Would you look at that!

Out here, I want to be outside. I want to take the time to walk and see and hear things. So I have learned to dress warmly. Yes, it takes a minute longer, both coming and going, but it makes the experience much more worth the time spent.

In my last post I wrote about living in the moment, and how I think that in the West, our inability to do this is very much tied up with seasonal variation. One of my long-time WordPress correspondents, a friend from the UK, said this has never been a problem for her, though she allowed that seasonal variation in Britain is rarely as severe as it is in the U.S. Of course that’s right. Our seasons are severe. Winter can be terribly cold and filled with precipitation. If we want to experience it, instead of pining for it to be over, we need to learn to dress warmly and get out there and see what it’s like.

So I hope I have learned that lesson. It’s a lesson I should have learned when I was a toddler, being dressed by my mother to go out and play in the snow. She fussed over our hats and coats and mittens, not to mention our big rubber boots. But once we were outside we built snowmen, had snowball fights, sledded on steep hills and stood at the back door begging mom to make us snow cream. When we finally came in, warmed by tomato soup and grilled cheese, the last thing we wanted was for winter to be over. The last thing we did was to wish away whole seasons of our young lives.

Living in the Moment

20 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by Tom Cooper in Driving, Mindfulness, Seasons

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Mindfulness, Seasons, Time

My drive to work takes me a long way down Highway 30, and passing into St. Louis County I cross a bridge over the Meramec River. It was sunny this morning, and I looked out across the water to see the sunshine on the water and that feeling that one gets when one sees sunshine on water came over me, a summertime feeling, a warmth here in December.

People are, for the most part, pessimists. Life teaches that. I could say to myself how wonderful it is to experience this sunny morning here in December, to find that warm sense of a summer day filling me on the way to work. I could share this experience with the people I work with. But someone would say to me, as someone always does, ‘Yeah, it’s nice today, but we’ll pay for it.’ Meaning that the cold will return; that we have two and a half months at least of frigid days left to go. We’ll see more snow, more frost, more freezing rain and plenty of cloudy days with little sunshine to brighten our mood.

An essential part of Buddhist spirituality is living in the moment. Be here now: experience fully what is in front of you and don’t fret about tomorrow and tomorrow. It is a way of clearing your mind and soul. Live now. But Buddhism developed in India. Here in the West, we have trouble doing this. I think it has to do with seasonal cycles.

India is closer to the equator. Sure, it is a huge area–they call it a ‘subcontinent’– and there are different climatic regimes, including monsoons along the coasts. But it is for the most part a place without well defined seasons. Friedrich Nietzsche called it ‘the bud and the blossom at the same time.’ Its ancient mythologies, as varied as they are, include no notable tales of how seasons come about. Time, as a concept, as something ruling one’s life, is not as pervasive there as it is here.

We live in constant cycles of change. The world about us goes from one thing to the next to the next over and over in our lives. As soon as summer sets in we start thinking about September and the cool days of autumn. As soon as November brings the first frost, we long for April. Given this, it is very difficult to grasp the idea, or achieve the goal, of living in the moment. We tend to live always for a moment in the near future, which, when it arrives, will pass again. This leaves us quite literally pining our lives away waiting for something we know is transitory.

And so I pass over the Meramec, and I appreciate the sunlight gleaming across the water, but with my next breath I begin counting the number of cold days I have yet to endure this winter. So I think that when people say ‘we’ll pay for this,’ it means two things. Nature will present us with more cold days, and soon: that’s a given. But more than that, we will pay out a large portion of our hope, our optimism, our enjoyment of each simple moment in life with our constant pining for a better season.

Recent Posts

  • Second Movements
  • Temperature
  • At Long Last
  • March
  • My Last Summer Here

Archives

  • February 2020
  • July 2019
  • February 2019
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • February 2016
  • December 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • May 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • August 2013
  • June 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011

Blog at WordPress.com.