As Winter Wears On

As winter wears on

what fate deals you

is a window of noticing

fogged by the familiar

like a storm of worry that

becomes its own weather, this

season is a betrayal that stays.

So much is hard to know for sure:

how to have a conversation

how to listen for the cloud lifting

how to wake and walk and keep on.

Let us be faithful, you say.

Don't draw the shade. Instead

live hungry for hope's dim glow.

I say, let us measure our wounds,

the shape of this ruthless subtraction.

We want a reason to trust in better days.

Maybe there’s power in refusal

or reckoning and release, in counting

questions that never deliver the

who what or how long

Maybe what fate deals you

is a life of winters in a single day

and the biggest decision is

to trust or turn, or to simply

and most painfully,

most importantly

put on a coat and

watch it go.

— Drew Myron

1.
“a window . . “ line is borrowed from Tom Vanderbilt, author of Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, who wrote "a window of noticing fogged by familiarity” published in The Art of Noticing Newsletter.

2.
“ruthless subtraction” is a phrase borrowed from astrologer Holiday Mathis’ Pisces horoscope for January 15, 2021.

3.
I have “hit the pandemic wall,” described in The Washington Post as a “sudden feeling of spiritual and emotional exhaustion with life during covid times.”

“The pandemic wall pops up at different times for different people, but for a vast group of people, the wall has smacked them in the face within the past three weeks. . . . ‘This fear of being around one another — that that fear is not going to go away in eight months,’ he says. The realization made him pull over and start to cry. ‘Those people who I was trying to console and keep upbeat — now it’s official, I’m one of those people.’ ”