Lighting Candles, Cursing Darkness

Not resisting winter, post-holiday stillness, and a dress crawling with snakes

The house is dark, though it’s the middle of the afternoon. It feels like we have just a few precious hours of daylight in December, and I obsess about how to use them. Especially now, when I’m on holiday break and have two weeks to do whatever I want. Today, I decide to go up to my sewing room and make a dress.

I open all the shades, to get as much sunlight as possible. The windows overlook the lower half of our property, where I can hear Kenn attacking the massive blackberry brambles with the tractor. He too is trying to get as much done as he can before the sun goes down.

I’ve had this dress cut out for weeks. Haley showed me the fabric a long time ago, and said it was very me, but I couldn’t think of a use for it until recently. It’s nice when someone can identify exactly what you’ll like, even better when it’s printed with colorful snakes and roses and insects.

Winter is a difficult time for so many people, but I’ve found a new appreciation for it this year. It’s a season that puts limits in place. There are limits to what we can do and where we can go, limits to how much light we get, limits to what grows outside, limits to what foods are available.

There’s an inherent sadness to winter, which is maybe why the aesthetics of the holiday season are so over-the-top joyful. That’s part of why I love the holidays so much. It’s that marriage of celebration and darkness, all the love and fellowship we need to sustain us at the onset of winter. Like a big prophylactic dose of vitamin C.

But then the holidays are over and everything is quiet and dark again. This is when a lot of people turn to the distractions of a new year, with resolutions and habits and a thousand different ways to mold yourself into something more perfect. I am far from immune from this, and I know it can be helpful. I’m a planner and a compulsive do-er.

But I also know that there is something perfect about where I am right now, at this moment, in the first week of winter. It’s cold and sometimes bleak, but there’s so much to notice in that. It can be mined, but you have to be willing to look. Your eyes have to adjust to the dark.

We resist sadness, but sadness can be a beautiful, positive, generative force. I’m not talking about the debilitating sort of sadness of depression, but the everyday, natural reactions to things that have that tinge of melancholy. Without it, how would we ever know what joy felt like?

Dr. Kristen Neff talks about the time she met teacher Shinzen Young, who gave her the equation “suffering = pain x resistance.” She wrote, “His point was that we can distinguish between the normal pain of life—difficult emotions, physical discomfort, and so on—and actual suffering, which is the mental anguish caused by fighting against the fact that life is sometimes painful.”

I find myself conditioned to avoid pain and discomfort, to seek things that feel easy and pleasurable. But the limitations that winter puts on me helps me to be a bit more still and let the darkness and the silence just be what it is – the other side of vitality.

The Dress

This dress was made witha print called Cobra Corsage by Lady McElroy, which is a cotton lawn with a good deal of body. The pattern is the Taylor dress. I really love it, although it’s definitely a “date night” l

evel dress and I question how often I’ll be able to wear it, but that’s ok. It’s worth it to own a dress with beetles and snakes all over.

Head, Heart, Hands

Things to make us think, feel, and do.

• Books: I made a list of the 5 best books I read in 2022. I hope to make a longer list in 2023, but I felt like I read a lot of boring business-y stuff this year. I’ve pretty much decided to lay off any “useful” book for a while.

• Books again: I just finished Cyril Hare’s An English Murder, which is a Christmas-set murder mystery with all the genre trappings, but with some unusal and incisive political commentary. And I’ve just started Faith, Hope, and Carnage.

• Food (and books): I am really into Nigel Slater lately, and have been cooking my way through Greenfeast: Autumn, Winter. Last night, we had toast with goat cheese, pickled beets, apple, and lots of seeds and dill. I also took a lovely panettone we were given by our neighbors and turned part of it into panettone ice cream from a recipe in The Christmas Chronicles. I’d also like to mention that I have been compulsively baking for the last few weeks and need to stop, it seems pathological at this point.

• I highly recommend this 20-minute mini-doc about Sally Schmitt, the founder of The French Laundry, who recently passed away. She was a visionary who found herself having to choose between life and the restaurant she loved.

• I like this concept of expressing love for objects through the act of repair.

• I often hear phrases like “mental time travel” and “future tripping” used negatively, but here is an argument that thinking of the future also makes us better people. I’m going to take this idea with me as I plan and think about 2023. How can I plan to come out of this year a better, kinder, more loving human?

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