December 17, 2024
Dear Leland and Everett,
As the weather turns cold, I notice the effects on my body. In yoga my body takes longer to warm up. Activities that didn’t previously now require a warmup period. Once I am warmed up, I can still do most of the activities I could do in warmer weather. But I can feel the relative brittleness of my body, and with it the potential for injury.
As with my body, so it goes with my spiritual being. As the days get shorter and darker and the weather gets colder, I notice my spiritual being also becoming more fragile and brittle than before. I can still do most activities, but I need much more transition time than before.
This past year was the first when I noticed the seasons affecting my mood. In the winter I could almost feel my being contracting, experiencing uncommon sadness and grief. In the summer I noticed not only more energy, but a desire to expend that energy with more activity pursued with more intensity and less sleep. Now that winter has returned, I am struck by the degree to which I feel the sadness creeping back in.
I think about how winter is the season of death. Shorter days and colder weather bring about death, in both plants and animals. We tend to associate death with something bad, but death is natural and normal. Life isn’t possible without death; life is born out of what is left behind by death.
I’m experiencing this season of death almost like a contraction of my spiritual being. The same way the cold weather shrinks my physical being, leaving less space for movement and creating brittleness, so the season shrinks my spiritual being. Thoughts, emotions, and memories are percolating to the surface: embarrassing or shameful experiences from childhood, memories of loved ones who have passed, fears of what might come in this state of vulnerability. In this state of contraction I sense an invitation to release these thoughts, in order to make space for what might come when the season turns again.
With any luck, by the time you read these words they will feel obvious, naive, or quaint. I write from an era where the culture resists its connection to the seasons and the natural world. We think linearly, assuming the world progresses. We miss that the world is also seasonal and cyclical. Technically we recognize the existence of seasons and cycles: we conceptually acknowledge the seasons and cycles of the earth around the sun. But we assume those seasons and cycles are exogenous, and affect us only superfluously. What I am starting to appreciate is just how deeply we feel those seasonal changes.
Part of what strikes me this year is not just how the seasons are affecting me, but how they appear to affect everyone around me in similar ways. As I notice my own fragility, I notice similar frailty in you, your mom, and practically everyone around me. For me, typically trivial tasks seem overwhelming, creating anxiety. For the two of you, that anxiety manifests as neediness: you are both asking for a little more attention than normal. Luckily, your mom and I have been sufficiently present and communicative to notice how our anxiety appears to be provoking challenging situations, whereas we would normally have reversed our perception of cause and effect.
On some level I’ve become convinced that Christmas has become one giant distraction meant to help us avoid feeling the pain and sadness that go along with the season. Scrambling at work to “get everything done” before the holidays, obsessing over purchasing gifts or planning travel or preparing to host…these activities consume us and keep us constantly moving. In the movement, we miss the opportunity to get still, to let the negative emotions pass through us, and to be released.
Ironically, Christmas coopted pagan holidays meant to celebrate the passing of the winter solstice. People celebrated once they observed the days getting longer again. Think about the implications: the weather might still be getting colder, and we might know there are months of dark, short, cold days ahead; but knowing the days are getting longer provides just enough hope for better days ahead that people felt a visceral need to celebrate. It seems natural to celebrate the birth of the new as the days get longer, but I feel we’ve lost something in the traditions we’ve created around Christmas. At the very least, we’ve lost the forest for the trees, focusing too much on the mechanics of the traditions of Christmas, and too little on the meaning behind it. And I don’t really mean the birth of Jesus; I really mean the transition from contraction into expansion. Of course, for those really paying attention, you will notice the birth of Jesus in fact symbolizes the transition from contraction into expansion.
And so, I watch everyone around me struggling this holiday season. I watch those who have lost loved ones feel that pain most acutely this time of year. I watch those who grieve lives not lived so that they may begin to accept the opportunities ahead. But most of all I watch folks busy themselves, fighting to overcome the brittleness and fragility of the season, resisting the opportunity to feel the pain, the sadness, the grief. I’m struck by how much I feel the need to slow down, to reduce stimulus, to transition slowly from activity to activity, and to give myself (and others) grace when we make uncharacteristic mistakes. But I’m even more struck by how much society pulls us in the other direction: keeping us busy and tempting us to avoid the stillness that might allow sad thoughts to surface but then release.
As you move into December, I hope you will take some time each year to set an intention: to observe how the changing seasons are impacting you. Do you feel changes in your body? Do you feel changes in your spirit? Do you feel the urge to resist feelings of sadness, with busyness or anxiety ? Do you see others acting out of a state of resistance? Once you begin to observe changes in yourself and others, you are likely to find yourself able to make better decisions. Personally I find it beneficial to slow down, say no to optional activities wherever possible, parse out the activities that absolutely must get done, and make space for reflection. More than anything, I find granting myself and others the grace to feel what we’re feeling, to move more slowly, to be more brittle and fragile, and to need a little more love and compassion. Take whatever of these practices are useful, but mostly I encourage you to create some practices meant to help you navigate the unique challenges of the Christmas season.
Merry Christmas. I love you both.
Love,
Dad
Letters to Leland 