The wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.

All the complicated details are completed

Photo by Laura Lefurgey-Smith on Unsplash

One of the most unexpected — and unpleasant — elements of sudden loss is that it throws literally every other thing into chaos. When someone you love dies, or even when someone you love knows someone who dies, there’s an immediate jumbling of times and dates and things to do and places to be. Your calendar, like a Boggle board, is picked up and shaken, and probably you feel like your guts are in there, too.

The feelings of helplessness are compounded with feelings of losing control over your time and your planning and your memories. There’s a minute there — just one minute — when you realize every single thing your brain had been relying on in the future would be different now and there’s a loss in that, too. And then there’s the minute when you would give anything for that period of boredom from last week or that ignorantly time when nothing was wrong from last year. Those little moments of quiet bliss that you didn’t notice at the time. You could use that now.

I have it now, I guess. I’m getting ready to take some time off — more than I think I’ve ever had, really, since as a freelancer (or as an hourly worker, or as a server, or as a citizen journalist) there’s not really such a thing as “paid vacation.” There’s been an amount of loss in my personal life in the last year and the last month and I think December is the time to look it square in its face and decide what it means.

It’s what I wrote about last year, too. Winter is the time when you look at what isn’t there. Or at least that’s what I do, I guess.

As my peers are listing the things they published and my friends are wrapping small presents for their small humans, I’m staring into space, trying to remember little scraps of poems I’ve read that keep clattering around in my head. I’m looking back, way back, in my memory to find pieces that hummed in me when I was younger and less afraid of tomorrow’s bad news.

There’s a poem by William Carlos Williams called “Winter Trees” that I was thinking of today, because it’s the Solstice, which is a day that is absolutely drenched in personal meaning. My family doesn't celebrate Christmas; we’re not Christians and haven’t been since I was old enough to read the story of white Jesus to myself out of a picture book. But we celebrate the Solstice as a time to get together and find light (literal light; nearly burning the house down is a fine part of our tradition). In the fifteen or however many years before I moved back to Oregon, it was the time I was always back. I knew it was December when I smelled the fog that settled over the Willamette Valley and saw the hillsides that looked more black than green in the low winter light. I used to think about “Winter Trees” when I drove into town, the dog starting to stir and stretch and circle in his seat the minute we ascended 30th Ave and he knew where we were.

This is that poem:

Winter Trees

All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold.

Now I live in Oregon again and all of December has felt that way, which is nice. And we’re not celebrating together until next week because reasons and that’s nice, too. But it’s a change of pace for us all — we shifted our days and arranged our times — and it means a little more time in my house, warm and twinkly. It also means impending downtime, which is kind of a new thing for me.

I always just thought about it as like, a poem about trees waiting for you, and trees showing you where you are. But when I reread it this year, I also saw its message about preparing and preparing and growing and then just taking a goddamn well-deserved break.

All the complicated details are completed.

I am exceptionally bad at taking it slowly, usually driven by the desire to get something done. To do something. To go outside or have an experience or clean my home or finish a project. To have something worth photographing or otherwise remembering. But most of my days are just not that memorable. And maybe that’s fine, because if the last year has made anything clear, it’s that the very most memorable moments are not really the ones you want to have any memory of.

But in the last few months I’ve been working a lot. And producing a lot. And trying a lot. And helping a lot. And emoting a lot. And losing a lot. There’s been a lot of loss. Which should make space, now, for doing less. You save money so that you can spend it. You stockpile supplies so that you can live off of them. You do a lot in advance so you can do less later. At least, that’s the idea.

Winter presents a kind of extra layer of idleness. If you’re not a Mountain Sports Person (and I am not), there’s no imperative to take part in activities. Not much grows. My garden, which provides me such a leafy diversion during the warmer months, is reduced to a small number of crispy twigs and a handful of frostbitten spinach that I’ve mostly left for the critters to eat.

In theory, this is the perfect time — having, like the trees, made the preparations — to sleep. And rest. And just sit around. And spend time doing whatever I want because the promise of the labor movement was **at least** eight hours for what you will, not at **most** eight hours for what you will.

But I can’t. I can’t because capitalism has made me feel like my value is in my work. I can’t because the internet has made me feel like if I’m not ruthlessly, aggressively pursuing my best life then I am barely living. And I can’t because my brain is a jerk and no amount of pharmaceutical intervention can make it power down for like, a small amount of time.

Years ago a therapist told me to come up with "down time mantras” to help me lean into quiet time. They included things like “no one needs me right now” or “no one is expecting me anywhere” or “I have nowhere to be.”

Which is just a less fancy version of “all the complicated details of the attiring andthe disattiring are completed!” The work is done. You’ve done it. Now you get to sit and revel in the fact that, at this exact moment, there is no new work that has been put before you.

Because if you don’t pause in those moments — if you don’t stop to notice when you’ve done everything that needs to be done, even if just for the afternoon — you will (I will) spend all of your time in anticipation of the next shitty thing.

And then in comes life, busting through the door with a battering ram, reminding you that every moment of quiet — every moment when you find that you’re not cold, you’re not hungry, you’re not in pain, and you look around and remind yourself, like Kurt Vonnegut, “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is” — is actually the best thing ever because it’s not a bad moment. It’s not the moment you get the bad news. It’s not the moment you’re fighting with your spouse and feeling like no one will ever see you clearly. It’s not the moment when you learn someone has died or someone is leaving or something is broken or some place you used to love has burned to the ground in a forest fire.

I feel like in what feels like a constant drip drip dripping of bad news water on your ancient stone heart, burrowing a hole over time, moments between the drops are tiny little oases. Like we’ve all gotten so used to a barrage of bad news that the space in between the bad news is something to treasure in and of itself.

She says confidently, as though she will ever stop waiting for more bad news.

One more poem before I sign off for the year (!!!!!), which is for my loves who have also lost someone this year. Who are trying to look at the ~most wonderful time of the year~ through tears and wondering if memories that used to be good will ever be good again. This one has been following me around the last few months.

This is a poem by Linda Gregg from 1999:

Winter Love
I would like to decorate this silence,   

but my house grows only cleaner

and more plain. The glass chimes I hung   

over the register ring a little

when the heat goes on.

I waited too long to drink my tea.   

It was not hot. It was only warm.

May your tea be warm, at least. I hope you find the silence between the drops to be comforting.

xo

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