How long is winter?
It’s been an unusually cold winter where I live. Since early December, our thermometer reads well below zero most mornings. The air feels like a slap when I step outside. Even the slightest breeze hurts my face, and I tear up.
But the cold is not the only reason for my tears; there’s much to grieve in the world, the country, and in the lives of people I love.
The poet Mary Oliver wrote,
How long is winter
and how will we bear it?
A friend in Canada asked me this week, “When will it end?” I couldn’t answer, no one can.
I could sidestep right here into the lovely metaphor of the seasons, where there’s a reliable answer: The weather here will ease sometime late March or April, as it always does. As always happens, the snow will creep into the chilly shadows of the trees and then be gone. Flowers will bloom. Grass will grow.
Change is inevitable, it’s true, but people aren’t seasons. We’re driven to change, for good and for ill, by matters much more complex, more fickle, more vulnerable than the tilt of the earth and the light of a sun.
Oliver writes,
until the earth is lifted
out of the great weight
of brokenness
There’s no inevitable tilt, no sun to warm human brokenness away. And when it shows up as violence, it’s a great weight indeed. I mean actual, physical violence, but not only that. Also any behavior that diminishes, demeans, or constrains for no reason but power or prejudice. The kind of violence some people feel in organizations or schools, in relationships, in communities.
Long before this historical moment, people have asked themselves how they will survive those kinds of winter. In systems much smaller than the cruel, complex ones I read about every day, people diminish, demean and constrain out of spite and power.
Many have asked, “how will I bear it?”
Oliver writes of birds, Buntings, lifting the earth from its brokenness “by their clear voices.” Clear voices offer a way through winters wrought by human cruelty, but not speaking out is not the only voice that matters. There’s also speaking in.
The other day a friend talked with me about a workplace that’s less and less bearable for them and their colleagues, even though its mission is community wellbeing. My friend had spoken out to the bosses – respectfully, kindly, even pleadingly – many times to no avail. If anything, things were worse. They were offering a clear voice, but maybe, I suggested, that sound was wasted on the powerful. Maybe their colleagues needed that voice - compassionate, encouraging, comforting words. Maybe speaking in could sow collective strength to bear that particular winter, and even to change it.
The sounds of horns and whistles warn of danger. They also they can signal, I am with you.
What if a system, I mean the kind I can recognize; a workplace, school, a faith community, a neighborhood, can be lifted out of the weight of its brokenness, by the sound of speaking in?
In the face of violence, I believe clear voices matter. Speaking out, yes, for those who can. But also speaking in with generous abundance to sadness, frustration, fear and grief, to agonizing rage from those with whom I share even small moments of my days. Sometimes, I’m with you, is enough.
Clear voices times a million can change the world. A clear voice offered 10 times in a day can change a workplace, a school, a community. When those kinds of systems shift, the systems around them shift too. That’s one of the ways the world can change.
There’s a very short poem by Andrea Gibson that reads: “Silence rides shotgun/wherever hate goes.” I’ll ride along with rage, but not hate, not violence.
So, I can speak out, or I can speak in, or both - but I do need to speak. I think that’s one way I can bear all kinds of winter, and help others bear them too.
_____
"Snow Buntings" by Mary Oliver, in What Do We Know (2003).
"No Such Thing As The Innocent Bystander" by Andrea Gibson, in You Better be Lightning (2021)