Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
We arrive at the crossroads while wandering in the woods, paths so perfectly aligned, quietly asking for a decision…..left or right, no obvious answer, no promise that either direction would lead towards a place less difficult to traverse.
The direction chosen would not matter and the timing of the arrival of no consequence.
There was no invitation to linger, just a gentle request to lift one foot and hope the ground held as you lifted the other to propel yourself forward.
The ‘winter’ we are inhabiting promises to be ‘endlessly winter’ and those whose hearts survive will have shed something that cannot be named, leaving it behind like a snake’s skin.
Whatever path chosen, leads to the bottom edge of the mountain.
The mountain is the true ‘wintering’, from it’s base all paths rise to the place “ahead of all parting” asking only that you arrive alone, trailing the substance of life in your wake “as though it already were behind you.”
wcw
photos westcoastwoman 2020
Wildly and Dangerously Free 
Thank you, needed this !
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I have stood so often at Crossroads without moving or even recognizing it as an invitation. This quote from Rilke somehow gave me the impetus to take a first step forward.
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A lot deeper than Robert Frost thought about it!
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Hi Ken. Yes:) even ‘wintering’ as a concept is interesting to contemplate…snow or not.
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Hi, Janet. Yes, ‘wintering’ is a concept I wasn’t that aware of, although, growing up in Montreal I was quite familiar with long winters. Many of us, though, were wintering for more than a year during the Covid-19 pandemic! And now that some of us are into our later years, the term, ‘wintering,’ has taken on another dimension, a different meaning. Perhaps, closer to what Rilke had in mind.
I just thought of Wordsworth’s poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, where he writes about our spiritual home, which is eventually forgotten here on Earth:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:/ The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,/ Hath had elsewhere its setting,/ And cometh from afar:/ Not in entire forgetfulness,/ And not in utter nakedness,/ But trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home:/ Heaven lies about us in our infancy!/ Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing Boy,/ But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,/ He sees it in his joy;/ The Youth, who daily farther from the east/ Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,/ And by the vision splendid/ Is on his way attended;/ At length the Man perceives it die away,/ And fade into the light of common day.
Which leads me to recall, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798. There he remembers five early years, 5 long winters, and his deep experiences in nature.
I have owed to them,/ In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,/ Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;/ And passing even into my purer mind/ With tranquil restoration:—feelings too/ Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,/ As have no slight or trivial influence/ On that best portion of a good man’s life,/ His little, nameless, unremembered, acts/ Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,/ To them I may have owed another gift,/ Of aspect more sublime;
And this is that famous transcendental description that’s often quoted:
that blessed mood,/ In which the burthen of the mystery,/ In which the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world,/ Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,/ In which the affections gently lead us on,—/ Until, the breath of this corporeal frame/ And even the motion of our human blood/ Almost suspended, we are laid asleep/ In body, and become a living soul:/ While with an eye made quiet by the power/ Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,/ We see into the life of things.
So, I guess, our ‘wintering’ will eventually lead us to that ‘perpetual spring’.
You think? 🤔
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Well, certainly takes us deeper than Robert Frost…:)!
This is a repost, I originally posted in November 2020 when we were deep in the Pandemic, so it would seem ‘ the more things change the more they stay the same’ I am writing something very different that I plan to post during the wintering we are approaching ( and already feel the icy breezes blowing from)
The pieces you quote above are inspiring and helpful. Thank you.
One step at a time towards that ‘perpetual spring’
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Glad they inspired and are helpful. Speaking of Robert Frost, this just popped into my Instagram feed: https://www.instagram.com/p/DB6nxfcR10o/. You can listen to him recite his poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, at his home in Ripton, Vermont in 1952. We are fast approaching that time he refers to in his poem, “The darkest evening of the year.”, i.e., the Winter Solstice. Of course, the other poem I was implying earlier was, The Road Not Taken, which famously ends with: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken
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It was actually Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening that I was thinking of originally but of course the Road Not Taken fits perfectly.
I was born on December 22nd, every once in a while the Solstice lands on that date but usually I think of that day as ‘the return of the light’. 🙂
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“but usually I think of that day as ‘the return of the light’. 🙂”
Yes, in a way it is that as well. Great point!
So, you were born to become a light in a dark world!
Winter well! 🙏
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