February 2012 has been challenging for me thus far. My energy has been low, anxieties high, and the snowfall in Denver immense and deep. I am no longer able to romanticize the coziness of winter–give me farmers markets and margaritas on the patio and darkness falling later! In an effort to quell some of my fears and subdue my own pouting and whining, I sifted through some of my old writing this morning and unearthed a short piece I wrote a few years ago and titled “Manifesto.” It’s not earth-shattering by any means, but it’s a nice reminder of basic values I’ve been able to return to at various points in my life (including many Februaries past):

“I used to think about my future with great anxiety. I worried about success, achievement, and the unknown. I wondered how it would feel to end up being just average, and I worried about how difficult it is to be noticed. What I’m beginning to realize is that the things I actually care about are simple. I care about having clean, soft sheets that smell nice. I make sure every morning that my sweet animals aren’t cold or hungry or sick, I turn off the porch light to save energy. I inhale as deeply as I can when I open the front door for the first time after I wake, and I buy the best cheap bottles of wine I can find for my friends and toast with them on a regular basis.

When I imagine the future days and months of my life, I hope for a lot of things, but none of them are very grandiose. I hope for a good partner—someone who is curious, funny, intelligent, kind, tolerant, expansive, sensitive. I imagine living with him in a house filled with books and bowls of fruit and flowers, big green plants, music, laughter, sunlight. I hope for healthy pregnancies and babies who grow up to be good and kind. I hope for honest, interesting work that pays the bills and for some trips to interesting places and some fabulous dinners out and tickets to see dance and music and theater. I hope for a vegetable garden, a front porch, a yard big enough for children and animals to play in. I hope for thoughtful, quirky friends with creative passions.

In my ideal future, my parents and siblings grow old with me in a world inching toward fairness and some level of enlightenment. I have time to read and write and muse, to listen to music and cook, to walk and stretch. My health is good, and the people I love are healthy, too. There are things I would surrender a career for, or a pay raise, in an instant, if I were faced with that choice. The change I’ve witnessed in myself is startling. I’ll be forgotten by the next century. I just want to leave having done my best to be real, having loved and laughed deeply, having hurt no one.”

What’s perhaps most comforting about this little piece is that it remains authentic several years later, and that I’ve been blessedly able to realize goals like finding a good partner and “honest, interesting work that pays the bills.” And admittedly it’s important to be reminded sometimes that those are the simple but essential miracles that will usher me safely through the rest of this icy winter.

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Indeed, this will be the second of only two blog entries that has the seasons as its cornerstone. Perhaps someday I will outgrow this fixation on climate and the months of the year and how it all makes me feel. But I can’t help wanting to write about Denver’s first snow–which occurred yesterday in the late afternoon–and my unexpected delight at the sudden darkening of the sky and its peppering of tiny November flakes on my yellow lawn.

This all may have to do with the fact that I have, to date, fallen in love twice during the winter. There is something very sweet and serious about holding mittened hands while crossing icy streets, bustling into restaurants together rosy from the cold and peeling off coats and ordering red wine, knowing that this thing–this new and unbelievable thing–has begun in the darkness, has become something hopeful in the depths of the cold.

There is also the food. Winter food, heavy and rich and decadent. When we eat in the winter we have the distinct sense that each meal has everything to do with our survival, despite the fact that we are, evolutionarily and as Americans, many centuries beyond that terrifying reality. Still, we cook soups and stews and bread and pasta and we drink whiskey and wine, and while we dine in our warm houses the sense that we are somehow surviving the elements is humbling.

I am certain that I would rather feel cold with the potential of getting warmer than hot with the option of becoming cooler. Former college roommates would confirm that I love nothing more than turning up the heat in a chilly house, often to their dismay. I also, recently, relish turning off the heat before sleep and snuggling into a big bed with a down comforter and a wool blanket, knowing that the rest of the house is drafty while I am cozy, and happy.

I will always love spring, its green shoots and its promises. Summer, too, with its farmers markets and sundresses and margaritas and bike rides. Fall used to be my favorite. I still love the colors and the moody light and the nostalgia of autumn. But this year I am befriending winter, perhaps for the first time in my life. I embrace its mittened lovers, its stews, its down comforters and candles, its snowflakes and drifts. And undoubtedly there will be a hyperbolic essay about spring, come April.

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We are down here in time, where beauty grows. Even if things are as bad as they could possibly be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.

–Annie Dillard, “Sojourner”

To begin the first entry of a new project with someone else’s words–perhaps this is a cop out. Recent reorganization of my bookshelves has had me rifling through old paperbacks, curious to see what I underlined months, years ago. The wisdom I find in passages that comforted me in the past remains startlingly relevant. Annie Dillard speaks to a particular view of life that resonates with me as much this afternoon as it did when I was seventeen, a life in which pleasure and beauty are perhaps the only real reasons we stick it out at all, and that’s just fine.

Some months are better than others. This year, August could have been easier. And September always seems to be accompanied by a sense of melancholy, despite my love of the softening light and cooler days. My mother and I recently counted on a full hand the deaths of loved ones that have occurred, in years past, in the month of September. My stepmother, her father, several dear family friends. Not to mention the losses incurred on a national level on the 11th almost a decade ago. No matter how casually these anniversaries are marked, September feels bittersweet, and rife with memories. My best friend from college maintains that it’s the cruelest month, April notwithstanding.

And yet it happens every year, without fail. The earth tilts, the days get shorter, the harvest transpires and then ends. It’s a predictable metaphor for life, and a humbling one, and it makes me think about the ways we humans keep ourselves getting up in the morning, despite forest fires and oil spills and sickness and financial strife and death. We bake pies from the softest late-summer peaches, we ride our bikes, we make cups of tea, we drink wine, we break bread, we feed our pets, we read fiction, we nap, we start projects, we go to movies, we laugh. It’s amazing, the simple things we do to find beauty and pleasure in our days and stay sane as each of the seasons begins and ends. Our dedication to the good life is remarkable.

In the throes of this crackly, cruel month, I am grateful for this little project, which I hope will continue in the seasons to come. If nothing else it pleases my sensibilities. A respectable pursuit, if you ask Annie Dillard.

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