Winter Enduring Foliage: One Season In Our Inner Year

 “Let my joyfully streaming face make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you, inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself in your loosened hair.  How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, one season in our inner year, not only a season in time, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.” Rilke

Last week I wrote about the melancholy nature of the Fall season and how at least for me is a time to allow myself to contemplate. It is a time to slow down and deal with some of the pain in life. It is a time to not “squander my hours of pain.”   It is a time to grieve over what I have lost. It is a time to consider my failures and disappointments. 

As I try to contemplate during this Fall season it occurs to me how difficult it is to do this  in our fast paced superficial culture that forever wants us to stay “positive.” It is almost impossible and men particularly are told they can never grieve. With our elder system largely dismantled, most of us have not been taught how to grieve. We lack a ritual to move us into and out of deep sadness.

Without such a ritual we are left to figure it out on our own or ignore our disappointments all together.   My guess is that many don’t even consider such a process and just “keep going”, living each day ‘outside’ their inner souls, cheering on their favorite football team, staying positive and keeping a perpetual smile. “I’m doing fine; thank you very much.”

Rilke powerfully speaks to this lost opportunity and how we often “squander our hours of pain”.  It describes how when pain or sadness enters our lives we just “gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end”.  My feeling is that “gazing beyond” is not the same thing as “going with” or “being with” one’s grief. It is not the same as what Robert Bly describes as “eating ashes.”

What do we lose by this squander? What do we lose by never deeply feeling and dealing with our grief?  All we have to is just look around at our culture and look within our hearts.  The poet suggests we will regret the lost opportunity, “How dear you will be to me then you nights of anguish"  for not tending to the development of the very foundation of our souls, . "Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, . . . but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.”

We need a ‘season’ to deal with our hours of pain so we can put on our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, our place, settlement and home. Without such a season we will remain naked, thin and flimsy, wondering what happened to the foundation of our souls.

The great wind is coming. Time to put on our winter-enduring foliage.