A North Country Winter status report

In meteorological terms, we'll hit mid-Winter in a few days, on January 15. Astronomically it'll be a couple of weeks longer, on February 4. That's at least mildly encouraging. Winter is like a deep, dark forest. We can only go halfway in before we're on our way out.

a January sunrise

Photo by J. Harrington

One of the nice things about Winter in the North Country is that the sunrises and sunsets are often spectacular, and sunrise these days is late enough (about 7:45 am) to make it pretty painless to observe. On several recent days the dreary cloud cover that hangs around all day was, at sunrise, broken enough along the horizon and the tree line to permit enjoyment of our part of the earth turning toward the sun again. The rest of the day the sky and the sun were pretty much hidden behind a veil of clouds.

Another nice thing about Minnesota Winters is that they provide more guilt-free time for reading, and writing, when I don't feel I should be outside doing something else. Over the past Winters, I've enjoyed reading several of Terry Tempest Williams books, most particularly Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Late last year I read her most recent book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing, and a couple of years before that When Women Were Birds. This morning I stumbled into an essay by TTW on Why I Write. When I couldn't find that essay on TTW's web site, I discovered an internet blogger who had reformatted the essay into a manifesto which, to my eye, looks, and reads, suspiciously like a poem. I love it. What do you think?

"Why I Write"

by Terry Tempest Williams

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.
I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white.
I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue.
I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things
differently perhaps the world will change.
I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends.
I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure.
I write against power and for democracy.
I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams.
I write in a solitude born out of community.
I write to the questions that shatter my sleep. I write to the answers that make me complacent.
I write to remember. I write to forget. I write to the music that opens my heart. I write to quell the pain.
I write with the patience of melancholy in winter. I write because it allows me to confront that which I do not know.
I write as an act of faith. I write as an act of slowness.
I write to record what I love in the face of loss. I write because it makes me less fearful of death. I write as an exercise in pure joy.
I write as one who walks on the surface of a frozen river beginning to melt.
I write out of my anger and into my passion.
I write from the stillness of night anticipating -- always anticipating.
I write to listen. I write out of silence. I write to soothe the voices shouting inside me, outside me, all around me.
I write because I believe in words.
I write because it is a dance with paradox.
I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in
sand.
I write because it is the way I take long walks.
I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness.
I write with a knife, carving each word from the generosity of trees.
I write as ritual.
I write out of my inconsistencies. I write with the colors of memory.
I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as witness to what I imagine.
I write by grace and grit.
I write for the love of ideas.
I write for the surprise of a sentence.
I write with the belief of alchemists.
I write knowing I will always fail. I write knowing words always fall short.
I write knowing I can be killed by own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by understanding and misunderstanding.
I write past the embarassment of exposure.
I trust nothing especially myself and slide head first into the familiar abyss of doubt and humiliation and threaten to push the delete button on my way down, or madly erase each line, pick up the paper and rip it into shreds -- and then I realise it doesn't matter, words are always a gamble, words are splinters from cut glass.
I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.
I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love. 

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