During the two years that I was studying for my masters degree, I would meet two of my closest friends every Sunday morning at a local coffee shop. We’d spend an hour chatting, venting, gossiping, and catching up on our lives (or lack thereof) over bagels and coffee, before the conversations would inevitably tangent off onto random topics. I miss those chats – and the insights into my friends I’d gain through them. So I thought I’d try to restart something along those lines on my blog. A chance to hear more from my readers… at first, I was trying to decide if I wanted something consistent: quotes/sayings, song lyrics, random current or pop culture events…. But I think it will be more fun, more free to mix it up. Just whatever I’m dwelling on at the moment. Hope you all have as much fun with it as I do.
No matter what you’re accustomed to during a “normal” winter, Winter has been pretty brutal across a large chunk of the USA this year. I live in the upper Midwest where we have had some really nasty wind chills and such. We expect cold winters, but not like this. It’s been miserable, and the extreme cold plus the snow have had my body in hysterics. The occasional warm spells didn’t really even help, because the sudden jumps from way-below-zero highs to highs in the teens or 20s (F) back to way-below-zero highs again confused my body even more. Meanwhile, I’m trying to walk or drive on the ice rinks we are currently calling streets. It’s been the kind of winter that starts to make me feel like maybe this year will be the year when Spring just forgets to show up…
There’s a bit of poetry that popped into my head during one of our especially cold spells, and has been providing a bit of solace ever since. It’s part of a much longer poem, and is taken rather out of context, but part of the appeal that art and poetry hold for me is that I don’t necessarily have to interpret them the way they were intended to be interpreted.
For winter’s rains and ruins are over, And all the seasons of snows, and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses, the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins. -Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon
I’ve been reciting these lines in my head as a reminder that eventually Spring will return, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now. I may not be able to see it, but daylight hours should be getting slowly longer. I try to remind myself that Spring starts to develop deep in the Earth and trees long before the buds start to show on the branches. Besides, the line “frosts are slain” has a splendid sort of vindictiveness to it that fills me with a rather unkind glee…
The thing about this concept of not always seeing the early signs of something is that it applies to more than just the Spring. It also applies to my flares. Just like I usually get a warning of their impending doom, they have usually started to gently ebb away before I realize that there is some relief coming my way. Of course, since I don’t see the signs, I’m busy cursing the flare in the meantime. The point is, really, that I’m so miserable, be it from a flare or the winter cold, that I can’t, or won’t, see the signs that relief is coming. Albeit slowly.
So while my body continues to flare in anger at the weather, and Winter marches interminably on, I try to put some faith and hope in the invisible signs of better days.
What inspires you to hope for better days?
*Disclaimer: As I stated above, I have taken these lines out of their greater context and applied the meaning as I am choosing to interpret it. To the people who never feel satisfied until they have mocked someone else: should you feel an absolutely redundant but inescapable need to point this out to me, please send me an email rather than leaving a comment. Preferably with a subject line with something along the lines of “mocking your interpretation of the poetry” or something so I know what I’m walking into when I open it. Thanks 😉