On Winter

And the end of 2025

I’ve taken a break from this for a few months. Other projects, family, sickness—COVID is still around, still sucks—have taken precedence, but I’ve been holding onto this meditation on winter for a few weeks. On the winters of my life. On the winters of history. On right now, what feels like a winter of the soul for this country, for the Jewish people, perhaps for the whole world.

Winter brings death. Gray overtakes the green of earth. Gray overtakes the blue of sky. Gray overwhelms the senses, external and internal, and becomes the stand in for the melancholy of an end of sorts, and we feel the pull of existential rest, decay, death.

But death, we know, is not the end of the story. At least it doesn’t have to be. It can be the downtime between the cycles of living. It can be the necessary hibernation that gives the cycles meaning, that makes living the miracle it is. I once believed that this cycle was inevitable; the Taoist in me says, “only do not contend,” and let the cycles go on as I float through them. Now I believe that’s only partially true. Our will to life, our hunger for a better world, our desire divorced from its object and cultivated as a source of light, is, after all, also part of the cycle. And in that, perhaps we don’t have control, but we have some agency, some role to play.

I’m heartened during this winter of our souls by the ubiquity of heroism, if you’re looking for it. It’s easy to miss if you’re not. But if you’re seeking it out, the resistance to spiritual corruption and decay is strong. Even with all the arguments among the heroes of the moment about strategy and vision, it is the desire to do better, to treat each other better, that I cling to.

Here again I come to our agency in this morass of our time. The whole soul goes through winters and springs, but those who twist and split and knot and otherwise seek to ignore or destroy the soul might put us on the path toward a winter from which we do not return. I don’t think we’re there yet, not even close really, but I do feel called to stand on the other side of the scale to say: there can be no compromise of the soul—wholeness must win out.

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I don’t want this just to be a message of hope in the midst of despair. I’m tired of writing that one note.

What are the other options?

There’s analysis—let’s try to understand better. But most analysis is either ephemeral or only half-true. The best of it, like Freud’s analysis of the psyche, is half-true, and that half of truth is what gives it staying power.

Then there’s the sermon, the preaching, the attempt to persuade others to have hope, to motivate them to be part of positive change. This is the job of leaders: to inspire with rhetoric, to use words to cut through the layers of cynicism and skepticism and activate that part of people that wants to be pulled into the greater project. I do that sometimes. I do analysis sometimes. But neither feels like exactly what calls me at this moment.

The mirror is what calls me. The mirror that distorts and reveals. The mirror whose distortions contain the pathways to revelation.

When I look in the distorted mirror—distorted because it’s the one mirror available only to me, only through my filter, particular to my experiences and the unique circumstances into which I was born and have lived—what do I see there?

I see the wide world with its billions of faces. Some turned away because they do not want to look. Some in masks. Some shining in light so bright it’s impossible to make out features. And many, myself included, struggling to look head on, shielding our eyes, fearful of what we’ll see those who have turned away doing inside themselves—the ways in which they are chopping away at their own souls so they don’t have to see the mirror at all.

But then, a ripple in the glass. An accordion-like fold in the other direction, away from us. The mirror pulling itself back toward a distant point. Squint and you can see it’s a mouth, and in its pull it is saying, in the voice of an operatic aria: Move, children. Move. Move. Move.

And it is more powerful than any of us.

P.S.

I’ve turned off paid subscriptions to this Substack, as I’m not writing regularly. I appreciate all who subscribed for $$$, and if I begin to post again in more of a rhythm, I’ll turn the payments back on. If you’re reading this Substack for the first time, subscribe!—everything is free—share, comment! For the next few months, I expect to write more experimentally, more thinking aloud. And I may tinker with the title and description. Happy new year, world!