Ancient Winter Writers

Approaching winter... OK, maybe encroaching mid-winter of life's seasonal span with resonantly compelling grace, perhaps even transparent vulnerability, feels controversial, too laissez-faire Too much courage in declaring preliminary success with too little curiosity about what happens next on planet Earth Continuing to revolve all four seasons dynamics holistic lenses. I recall the poet's admonition to not go quietly into this winterish cold night. Life's final reflective opportunity does not invite quiet so much as impassioned peace of a windless snowfall blanketing all I can see and more faintly hear, touch and awkwardly feel, smell and bittersweetly taste unsafe passage. I recently moved from autumn habitat, a creative tension between summer's midlife climax and this new winter habit above Connecticut's exquisite Salmon River. This is a compromised writer's winter hermitage shared with my son who cannot speak but can roar, who cannot walk by himself but can scoot and belly laugh at his own internal sensations and my external sensational sounds. And, following Daquan from my fall habitat to winter's eremetical search for peace, however coldly displaced, with social and political and spiritual and natural distancing, Behind Daquan are daily in-home nurses and his most avid companion, my romantically distanced husband. He comes bearing gifts of clothes, cleaning supplies, far too much meaty food for a proper hermitage and not enough for sufficient redemption and for self-forgiveness. He comes unaware of my ecofeminist wintering spirit, longing for Earth's warm womb justice restoring peace resilient through all four seasons of present past and future Earth lives. My ecofeminist lineage feels too white to him, not a journey for him and our two brown sons and my brown and cerebral palsied daughter and Daquan. So, this writer's winter hermitage remains newly compromised by past fall and summer and even spring of extended multicultural family life. May it always be so or no, I'm not sure which to pray for or against as I quietly write into this warm and peaceful night, just right, not too dim or bright.