Notes from Deep Winter

“There is a wilder solitude in winter

When every sense is pricked alive and keen

For what may pop or tumble down or splinter.

The light itself, as active as a painter,

Swashes bright flowing banners down

The flat white walls. I stand here like a hunter

On the qui vive, though all appears quite calm,

And feel the silence gather like a storm.”

— From “The House in Winter”, by May Sarton.

May Sarton’s words ring as true as ever as I type this at 3:08am on a Wednesday. Home-bound due to ice, my senses are indeed keener than ever, somehow simultaneously hunting and content.
And I think this might be the state of the yogini: hungry and (yet, improbably) content.

In November, I longed for a period of deep work*. A shift from the daily rhythms to finish this, create that and also to tinker without an end-point. My vision was of a kind of at-home retreat: a few days a week devoted completely to undistracted work on projects that required more than I could generally offer them during the regular flow of the week during teaching season. Naturally, blessedly, the retreat I dreamed of took the form of snow-days, sick-days, holy-days and more ice-days. Instead of hours of uninterrupted work, I received the boon of countless hours at home with my daughter so that new work could reveal itself.

The work is deep. No matter what form it has taken during this period of deep winter.  The mental and physical** space that opened up from deleting my personal Facebook account alone allowed for connections with parts of myself that had been bound up for maybe forever. The boundaries I created, coupled with those imposed by bad weather and necessity created room for the completion of systems and structures that will allow for even deeper dives into practice in the future.

Punctuated by days on days of my child complaining about boredom and her desire to watch T.V. in spite of being surrounded by art projects, books, creative spring-boards innumerable. “But boredom is good for you.”–Is not a constructive reply, though it IS a profound truth. Whether my practice is working is a question for those days when whining and complaining seem ceaseless.

The householder, mother yogini. An enigma. Hunting for moments to meditate in silence, and somehow simultaneously, enchantedly content by the curl of a tiny one’s hair or a whiff of sweet breath.

A mother’s state is one of near-constant interruption. At any given moment, someone is deeply put-out by her apparent lack of attention. Everyone’s need is expected to be translated as the pre-eminent urgency. The return to presence is a great boon of practice.

And even to confine it with those words seems to trivialize the state, since it changes so fast. Weeks go by and I’m out on the edge of skin and bone… “every sense pricked clean” in the words of Sarton, only to dive into a pool of squishy distraction. And of course it is correct and rightly timed and a presentation of the gunas and my navigation of the world overlaid with each of their unique properties, like a transparency over the projector of this human experience.

The practice itself is at times a distraction. Or, I should say, the by-products of practice create conditions that make some aspects of daily life challenging. Like the sensing of light, not just visually, but as its elevated temperature and the hum of its vibration. For two years, the inner-basement hum of my next-door neighbor’s marijuana grow operation kept me awake all night. The neighbors have since moved, and the heat from their house has dwindled, but tonight I was roused from sleep by the sweet sound of rain only to notice how my hands can “hear” the vibration and texture of the femur-bones they rest upon.

And so the deep work. Hard to quantify, impossible to categorize. Necessary. Very much counter-cultural.

* Deep Work, by Cal Newport, is a book on creating space for distraction-free work. I think it’s great. I might write a review about it someday, maybe.

** Before I left Facebook completely, I had begun to *feel* the network on my right side from shoulder tip to the top of my head. Even though I was pretty sparse in my use in the final 6 months, I felt a physical connection to the site. For me, this was not a good thing. Although I miss a few of the connections that I maintained solely through FB, I do not regret leaving at all.

(I took this photo on Christmas Day at Bryce Canyon in 2009.)