Posts tagged with "snow"

Snow Man

In preparing for the next phase of the Natural Change Project, the residential in Glen Prosen, I realise I have been in defensive mode: planning to protect myself against the elements, layering up against the cold and insulating myself from all real and, fuelled by the many recent TV programmes about life in the Arctic, imagined privations. Coming across this poem has given me a different perspective. I don’t completely understand it but it seems to say something about extending our boundaries into the natural environment, shifting  in and out of the ego perspective. It reminds me that we are both part of and separate from the natural world and the realisation again that nature is always there, irrespective of us. A useful preparation, as well as the thermals and flasks. 

Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens
– from Harmonium , 1923

Every branch big with it

This poem, so evocative from my childhood, has been in my head as I’ve looked at the trees covered in hoar frost, then snow, then hoar frost again…

Snow in the Suburbs

by Thomas Hardy

Every branch big with it,

Bent every twig with it;

Every fork like a white web-foot;

Every street and pavement mute:

Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward, when

Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.

The palings are glued together like a wall,

And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,

Whereon immediately

A snow-lump thrice his own slight size

Descends on him and showers his head and eyes,

And overturns him,

And near inurns him,

And lights on a nether twig, when its brush

Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,

Up which, with feeble hope,

A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;

And we take him in.

Involuntary Simplicity

White is the new green. Since the snow arrived, we have been, in our small neighbourhood, summarily conscripted to the sustainability movement. The recalibration effect of being snowbound for a fortnight has taken us back to simpler pleasures and more sustainable ways of living. Our cars, looking like big, badly bubble-wrapped packages, are littered round the roadside, going nowhere. Work has been done from home, provisions have been communally organised.  We have renewed our sense of community. So would we become volunteers when the thaw sets in and we regain freedom of movement and choice? Would I?

The positives are piling up: walking daily in the fresh air through pristine snow: being creative with basic ingredients: not spending money: undertaking immediate and necessary physical tasks: getting satisfaction from eking out resources; tearing up the diary and living in the moment; appreciating home comforts; being a neighbour and citizen not a consumer.

So what’s not to like when the ice melts? Where is the rub in the rural idyll? Hardship does not come into it. It has only been two weeks. Isolation has hardly been the issue either. With broadband and mobile phones, television and radio, we have as much contact as we want with the rest of the world.  We have always rated home cooking more highly than eating out. Social life has continued in a different form. Cosy chats in the kitchen instead of the glamour of the urban gin palaces and tinselled emporia.

But it’s worth thinking about the potential barriers to signing up to this lifestyle for the longer haul: it is no surprise that the ego is beginning to look for a get out of jail card. The ego rails against the restriction on freedom, the compromised autonomy and the limitation of choice represented by no quick getaways in the car, no ordering online (no point, no post) and no exotica in the supermarket when we eventually manage to get there.  Limes and coriander are the new basics aren’t they? The ego was never going to like being buried in snow for long.

 And there is something else: lack of novelty is harder to pin down but has something to do with the constant influx of the new in one’s life, new ideas, the next big thing, new copy, new stuff, the ever changing stimuli needed to feed restless appetites, self-expression through knowing, having and being the latest, the most original, the best.

So one of the most challenging aspects of voluntary simplicity is coming to terms not just with not needing new stuff (several little black dresses are partying on their own in the wardrobe with nowhere to go), but also the more subtle things like not getting to the coolest café, not knowing about the next big thing, withdrawing from the frontline of recognition. “I’m out there, therefore I am” might have to become, “I am secure in myself, therefore I am”. That really would be le dernier cri.

Footnote: the secret of happiness has now been revealed; the secret of happiness is, as previewed by one of our group in Knoydart, a dry pair of socks.

Snows and Silences

once a birdbath, now a snowcone

Snows and Silences

The snow which has fallen, flurried, mounded, masked, morphed and so firmly adhered to and re-shaped our lives here in Scotland in recent days, could be considered a kind of meteorological solo. It has afforded us an opportunity to live very differently for a period of time. Nature has been an inescapable force in our lives and we have had to submit to its power. Normal routines have been suspended, priorities have radically shifted, and there have been, for some of us at least, greater opportunities for silence.

 Just as there is more than one type of snow, so there is more than one type of silence. Sara Maitland, in her extensive and fascinating enquiry into silence*, identifies two seemingly incompatible traditions: the ego-surpressing, self-emptying silence pursued by the early hermits and later by the great monastic orders and the self-expressive, ego-affirming silence sought by the romantic tradition and valued as a means of accessing emotions and facilitating the expression of individuality and creativity.

 My own solo seemed to reflect both these silences at different times. The early part of the day was taken up by heightened sensing, intense experiencing of the environment and the almost frenetical creation of a linguistic response. In contrast, the later part of the day took the form of a meditative walk, when it was enough to meander at a slow pace through the environment, not thinking about very much at all, not needing words.

 Sara Maitland sees silence very much as a positive thing, countering the prevalent western view of silence as a negative, a deficit or absence, “something waiting to be broken”. She positions silence not as the opposite of language but as a separate state. She notes that recent neurological research shows that while language is processed in the cerebral cortex, silence, or at least the areas of the brain engaged by meditation activity, is processed in what in evolutionary terms is an older brain area, the sub-cortex or brain stem and limbic system.  This in turn suggests the existence of a pre-linguistic or semiotic state of consciousness,

 “It seems to me that silence offers those people who want it a return journey into the semiotic, the seedbed of the self.”**

 When words “fail” us or we experience ineffability, could this be because we are experiencing the world from a different, more ancient, consciousness? Is it possible to experience reality without the mediating effects of language? Language defines us as humans and plays a triumphant role in defending our egos. Who are we and what does it mean when we cannot access words?  I am beginning to get the message that the more extended our concept of self and the more permeable our ego-boundaries, the more likely we are to find out.

*A Book of Silence: a journey into the pleasures and powers of silence

Granta 2008

** ibid, Pg 281

Hibernating through the snow