Bleak and barren, winter is the season when nature is silently preparing to burst forth in spring — the grand incubator of life. Rilke noticed a human equivalence when he celebrated winter as the time for tending to your inner garden. His modern Dallas Lore Sharp (December 13, 1870–November 29, 1929) — a former clergyman, whom the nice John Burroughs lauded as America’s best nature author — captured this delicate dialogue between nature and human nature in his 1912 ebook Winter (public library | public domain) — a lyrical effort “to catch the spirit of the season… the big, free, robust, fierce, wild soul of Winter,” to channel “the bitter boreal may… that’s wild and fierce and powerful and free and enormous inside us.”
Sharp serenades the season inside and the season with out:
Winter inside us means vitality and function and throbbing life; and with out us in our fields and woods it means widened prospect, the storm of battle, the holiness of peace, the poetry of silence and darkness and vacancy and demise.
And but this deadness is illusory, concealing the profound resilience of wintering nature. Sharp counters the floor impression:
The winter world shouldn’t be lifeless… The chilly is powerless to destroy… Life flees and hides and sleeps, solely to waken once more, endlessly stronger than demise — brisker, fairer, sweeter for its lengthy winter relaxation.
In what can greatest be described as a prose poem, he exults within the life-force behind the stillness:
I really like the winter, and so do all youngsters — its naked fields, empty woods, flattened meadows, its ranging landscapes, its stirless silences, its tumult of storms, its crystal nights with stars new reduce within the glittering sky, its problem, defiance, and mighty wrath. I really like its wild life — its birds and animals; the shifts they make to overcome demise. After which, out of this winter watching, I really like the gentleness that comes, the sympathy, the understanding! One will get very near the guts of Nature by such understanding.
With an eye fixed to an empty robin’s nest, he provides:
Laughter and tears are companions. Life begins, however demise generally ends the path. But the sum of life, open air and in, is peace, gladness, and achievement.
Winter, Sharp argues, is coaching floor for consideration and the artwork of noticing. Many years earlier than the nice nature author Henry Beston reverenced the sacredness of smallness and a century earlier than the bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer composed her love letter to the splendors of the small scale, he writes:
Winter, when the leaves are off, the bottom naked, the birds and flowers gone, and all is diminished to singleness and ease — winter is the time to watch the shapes, colours, varieties, and progress of the lichens.
However no small marvel of winter is worthier of attentive reverence than snowflakes — a technology after Wilson Bentley first photographed them under his microscope, Sharp beckons us to discover a microscope of our personal and marvel at their fractal magnificence, every snowflake seemingly “formed by an infinitely correct hand in accordance with a sample that appears the perfection, the very poetry, of mechanical drawing.”
Above all, winter is the season for trying twice — for seeing the second layer of nature, the sweetness past the bleakness. In a sentiment topped with a quote from the unsurpassable John Burroughs, Sharp writes:
See the winter bleak and cheerless as at occasions you’ll, and as at occasions you ought; nonetheless if you’ll look twice, and suppose as you look, you will note… the naked empty woodland contemporary budded to the tip of every tiny twig — life all around the timber thrust ahead to catch the contact of spring! You will notice the broad flinty fields thick sown with seeds — life, extra life than the solar and the soil can feed, sleeping there below “the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow”!
From winter’s harshest guise, Sharp wrests a tempest of soul-slaking magnificence:
The sorrows of winter are its storms. They’re its best glories additionally. One ought to no extra miss the sight of the winter storms than he ought to miss the sight of the winter birds and stars, the winter suns and moons! A storm in summer season is simply an incident; in winter it’s an occasion, part of the principle design. Nature provides herself over by the month to the planning and bringing off of the winter storms — huge arctic reveals, the goals of her wildest moods, the work of her mightiest minions. Don’t miss the comfortable feathery fall that plumes the timber and that roofs the sheds with Carrara marble; the howling blizzard with its high-quality reducing blast that whirls into smoking crests; the ice-storm that comes as sluggish, comfortable rain to freeze because it falls, turning all of the world to crystal: these are a number of the miracles of winter that you have to not overlook.
Couple with Adam Gopnik’s modern love letter to winter, then take a winter walk with Thoreau.
