I’ve lived in a lot of places with bad weather. Dark skies, sub zero temperatures and snow that clumps and hardens and catches your foot right as your trying to get up your front stairs. I’m no stranger to the funk and the bleak feelings weather can impart. I’m odd in that I also experience a dread of summer, but that’s more based on physiological reasons than anything else. I hate hot weather and I don’t fare well under it.
I have a housemate who is effectively gone to a remote island for awhile. And I am job hunting and on my own in the freezing cold house for now (gas heat is expensive as hell here). The job that I found several months ago was far less stable than it led me, or others, to believe in the interview process. I’m no stranger to layoffs. They come and go in a predictable tidal fluctuation that eventually takes the oldest and weakest of us and washes us far out from shore each time. Can you make it back? Are you a strong swimmer? Since 2008, I have dutifully spent far too much time building tech skills. I don’t have a partner with someone in my life where another’s money is there for mutual safety. I depend on myself and I like it that way, but when layoffs hit, no matter how hard I’ve worked on my skills, some amount of self-doubt creeps in. It’s all part of the game. In 2008 I lost what money I had. And it took a year to find a new job in Seattle. It was a hard time, a hard test. But you know, I’m thankful for that.
But it’s not just job status or the weather. It’s the digging deep for strength that is nipping at me right now. Grappling with uncertainty. Thankfully, I had a nice Christmas in France with S. and that really helped in many ways to let go from worries. But the holiday season goes on for so long here in Ireland that it feels like an eternity. I’m also not a Christmas fan and have always preferred a quick conclusion to the holiday season. Still, I feel a temporary lapse of something inside. Feeling unsure of myself. Did I say the wrong thing? Did I present myself well on the video call? All that is heightened right now.
So, as a response or something, I’m rereading “Housekeeping” by Marilyn Robinson. Why not read a darkly atmospheric tale set in Idaho about two sisters being raised by various women in their family after their father was killed in a train accident (where the train itself slides into the very lake they live on)? it wrestles with dissolving boundaries between dreams and waking life, inner and outer selves, all that. The family house is in a small town called Fingerbone set on a frigid and uninviting glacial lake. It is a town “chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.”
So there is my current winter reading! And a few other things thrown in.
Predictably, the gym helps and I try and go four times a week or so. Not sitting around watching the shadows crawl. Finding more books, shows to watch, walks to take, and urging myself to get back to making art. Writing so I can continue muster up my connective tissue. But this winter brought some bad news with it. Not just the job loss, but my nephew passed from the world suddenly in October. He was part of my birth family and I don’t feel much like elaborating, but he was someone you couldn’t help but love and admire and worry after all at the same time. He was a really good soul. And I miss him.
So, now I am embracing the Dry January and will likely continue doing it past one month. All part of saving money and keeping a clear head while job hunting. Entering some writing contests here and there and preparing for interviews that will involve all sorts of challenges. The market definitely dipped, and I have not relaxed much in my career. So I should be fine. I just wish I had more time for creative makings.
Found this quote today by Ursula K. Le Guin and I like the tree branches in winter. I take far too many pictures of them!
“In winter, we are prone to regard our trees as cold, bare, and dreary; and we bid them wait until they are again clothed in verdure before we may accord to them comradeship. However, it is during this winter resting time that the tree stands revealed to the uttermost, ready to give its most intimate confidences to those who love it. It is indeed a superficial acquaintance that depends upon the garb worn for half the year; and to those who know them, the trees display even more individuality in the winter than in the summer.”
Here’s one of my collage pieces. I have to say, the whole process is more calming to me. And I’ve been home most of the day, time to go hunt down something for dinner and see if I can’t find a movie before heading back home.
