Poem People: I'm quitting

Coping with the deep darkness of winter

Entering the deep darkness of daylight savings, emerging from eerie celebrations of Día de Muertos, All Saints Day, and Halloween, we’re pink and raw with the new beginnings of winter.

When winter arrives, it feels like the true New Year’s Eve. It buzzes around us with a harsh demand like beginnings often do. A cold brush on the face reminds us of survival, our needs, our situation, and darkness.

I like the reality slap in the face. This reset is built into seasonality, but we don’t feel it anymore in our temperature-controlled imported-foods lifestyle. Struggle and discomfort don’t rise naturally and release like they would when people retreated home for warmth or spent days canning tomatoes for the cellar.

I’m quitting summer, the sticky golden nights of activity and ease. I won’t gloss over my inadequacies or my dissatisfactions, in my routine, my behavior, in my apartment, or my job. Winter thrusts us into the now. In the now, I meet my babyish needs and whimpering dreams, the truthful voice in my head that I ignore.

I quit pretending and I’m starting now in the deep darkness.

Quitting

Quitting is the whipping wind with a whisper of pink in response, 
I arrive sore and tender at the mouth of a shelter cave

My trunk is stuck in the ground but a honeysuckle light 
glows ahead and my toes twitch.

Tediously, I untangle my vines, carefully unearthing 
my delicate flaws in spines and clusters.

We are nothing in our own stature as singular units.
Frailty resounds and demands, calls and cries and crackles. 

To endure is easy, but to begin is hard. A threshold dosen't move on its own. 
Warmth finally greets my labor when I finish, the labor that made all the difference. 

Here I will stay and root for a season until I budge for the light.
I only know I can begin again because I've done it before. 

WInd-stung and wanting a place to hide 
I’ve been here before, I’ve quit already. 

Simply put, someone arrives at a warm shelter in the winter. They don’t know if they can go inside because it’ll be too painful when they inevitably have to go outside again. However, they know they can because that’s why they were outside in the first place.

This piece has a lot of adjectives and jumping perspectives. There’s no rhyme or reason in the stanzas. It’s poetry you’d see in early development, but that’s how I feel. Very raw, rudimentary, and new. I’m not self-conscious. I’m optimistic and eager for new pathways.

I don’t usually link related content in Poem People, but who cares! I’m new!

• “Do you trust that time will be your friend?
  Do you trust that there will be good things
  To meet you in the end?
  'Cause what I'd like to know, is this it?

  .

  Lady in the darkest hour
  Smile all sweet, like it isn't sour
  I'd go back to last December
  To feel those things I can't remember”

  - Lyrics from the song “Lady in the Darkest Hour” by Kate Bollinger

  

• “Make me a channel of your peace
  Where there's despair in life let me bring hope
  Where there is darkness only light
  And where there's sadness ever joy”

  - Prayer to Saint Francis “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace

  

• “If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt. We seem to be living in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression.”

  - Passage from Wintering by Katherine May

  

• “Frederick, why don’t you work?” they asked.

  “I do work,” said Frederick.

  “I gather sun rays for the cold dark winter days.”

  .

  And when they saw Frederick sitting there, staring at the meadow, they said, “And now Frederick?“

  “I gather colors,“ answered Frederick simply. “For winter is gray.“

  .

  And once Frederick seemed half asleep. “Are you dreaming, Frederick?“ They asked reproachfully.

  But Frederick said, “Oh no, I’m gathering words. For the winter days are long and many, and we’ll run out of things to say.”

  - Passage from Frederick by Leo Lionni