new year

I relish in the realization that I love January.  I like to hear myself say it, and I hear it a lot.  And see myself write it.  I'm not sure what happened to change things.  I used to abhor Winter, especially January.  Still a victim of seasonal affective disorder, I've transitioned into one who holds winter closely, clutched as a treasure in a tight fist against her chest. 

It may have begun with the painting.  One winter, a friend and I decided to paint a picture for my husband's Christmas gift.  Bea is an artist and I am a person who wants to create but cannot quite manage to organize the pencils or brushes or light enough to get started.  So every Saturday, I went to Bea's and we worked on the painting, her coaching my every brush stroke.  It was as I said, winter, and Bea lives in the country.  And not just a country home but in the small bedroom of an essentially gutted old house.  Doing much of the refurbishing herself, it has been a slow undertaking, often neglected in favor of art or seafood alfredo or the stroking of a particularly affectionate and needy Dachshund named "Cricket".  It was in this room we created the painting that brought tears to my husband's eyes on Christmas Eve when he tore away the wrapping and saw it for the first time. 

But for me, the magic was in those long, quiet Saturday afternoons in Bea's room; dark, leafless trees and miniscule flitting birds through wavy glass.  I would have preferred to have left the painting to her, lying instead on her twin bed, sleeping for hours then slowly awakening to drink coffee from a hot mug while staring dumbly at the show in her yard and front porch.  But I was there to paint and paint I did.

The act of painting rewired me mentally and I later found myself involuntarily wondering how to paint anything I looked at; trees outside my bathroom window; brittle, lustless pastures in Janurary; a dry oak leaf stuck in a cluster of pine needles.  And not just that but I began to view the world differently, more gently, reverently.  And with it came an appreciation of the bleakness of late Fall and Winter.  The starkness of January, in particular.  The quiet, darkness.

It was a breakthrough, a passage, a healing of some invisible psychic wound.  I now see Winter as the natural cycle it always has been, me having been out of sync, not seeing it as it was, having cheated myself fifty Winters of awe and inspiration and peace.  The painting that Winter brought to me a gift, as well, allowing me the capacity this day, years after that season of magic and change, to revel in a fire in the fireplace, and on it's hearth, two kittens outstretched on the warming firewood awaiting its turn.