The trees, for starters, whose discarded branches and twigs litter the muddy lawn after the pruning winds last night. Beyond the wood, the very earth at our feet is sundered, knifed open by the running rivulets of snow melt and rain given common rending cause by the dramatic change in temperature. Someone will likely benefit downstream from nature’s theft of topsoil, but the land left behind looks like the victim of an alley mugging.
And as for the rest of us, never mind the wind and water; we are simply broken. Winter has effectively done its work. There were times, earlier in the season, when we smugly, assertively even, added another layer of clothing and ventured forth into the arctic blast as though we were conquerors. We stepped confidently, if carefully, across the icy parking lots, and turned our dry, red cheeks combatively into the bitter winds. But that was before; before Winter kept coming, and coming, and coming at us, ramming away at the barred door of our psyches like a medieval army, until our resistance finally gave way, splintering into utter vulnerability. After months of its relentless battering, Winter has finally, without argument, prevailed. It has broken us.
And then just when we were about to succumb, accepting that we were irrevocably broken apart, the weather itself breaks and we realize that we have simply been broken open.
That’s what Winter is for, at least in part. The soil understands it, and the seeds that crack open there and find their footing. If, as Leonard Cohen famously observed, “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in,” it is similarly true that that’s how things grow — in the cracked and broken, muddied places. Spring, I’m finally learning, isn’t merely a change in the weather; it is the fecund readiness made possible by Winter’s strong and unremitting hand.
I’m under no delusion that it is finally over. The temperatures will almost certainly dive again, and we’ve not likely seen the last of the snow. But Winter’s victory secured, it can safely loosen its grip. Our pretensions and self-assurances no longer pose any threat. No face-saving evasions or alternate explanations remain. We’ve been broken. Open. And mud now fills the cracks.
The only question remaining is, “For what?” Duly prepared by winter for spring, I wonder what nourishment or beauty will take root in the resulting rubble, muck and mud that I have, as a result, become?
