Cold, rainy mornings covered by mist are a rarity out here. Things that are rare generally become more valuable, so I think it’s worth spending some time thinking about foggy days and chilly winds. I’ve been sick for a few days, not able to get out and around like I would like to, but this in a way lends itself towards looking more deeply into what is right in front of me, instead of rushing off to find the next thing to see or do. So I’m sitting on the back porch, watching the dawn come, watching how the mist holds the sunlight and diffuses it. The mist is brooding over the hill.
It’s creeping around the house, hiding the tree trunks and power poles in veils of white. Mist doesn’t simply hide the world. It reveals it as well. Floating branches reach through a haze of nothingness, the black, twisting branches are like sketches of a lost world. A yellowed leaf leaps to life, bright and surprising through the formless cloud that has settled over us, while the chatter of birds as the rain slows is louder, somehow sweeter through the fog, like a faded beauty that was, for a moment, revived through a certain light.
Philosopher Joanna Macy, in her book, A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke, quotes from a letter Rilke wrote regarding how cold weather fires the inner life and causes memories to emerge. I think the combination of cold, rainy mist, plus being sick, really does this. It says, “You might notice that in some ways the effects of our winter experiences are similar. You write of a constant sense of fullness, an almost overabundance of inner being, which from the outset counterbalances and compensates all deprivations and losses that might possibly come. In the course of my work this last long winter, I have experienced a truth more completely than ever before: that life’s bestowal of riches already surpasses any subsequent impoverishment. What, then, remains to be feared? Only that we might forget this! But around and within us, how much it helps to remember!”
Everything is dripping–the raindrops have a slow, even pattern, quietly drawing delicate circles in the puddles on the concrete. The value of winter secrets is not necessarily in what they contain, but maybe it’s more in the focus of the mind they bring to us, the curiously gathered attention, waiting on a new revelation. So it is with misty mornings. It’s not in what you can see or hear, but in what is revealed by seeing less. Sometimes you cannot see something clearly until it is hidden.
Winter days like these are more inner than outer, as we’re often stuck at home, gazing at a strangely altered world through our windows. I know a lot of people don’t like them; they’re waiting on summer. Me, I’m fully into them, hoping we see another few before spring.
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com
