The Bitter Wall of November
“This is the time to be slow, lie low to the wall until the bitter weather passes. Try, as best you can, not to let the wire brush of doubt scrape from your heart all sense of yourself and your hesitant light.”
I have always been impatient with November. It likely started, as many things do, with where I grew up. I spent the first half of my childhood in rural Kentucky. Kentucky Novembers are bitter, spiteful things. The trees are bare, the grass is brown, the sky is iron. When it snows, the snow doesn’t so much as fall as spit viciously into your wind-sore eyes.
November also marks the beginning of the season where we’re definitively ushered inside in the Northern Hemisphere. For the next four (or if you live in the Rockies like me, seven) months, outdoor activity is either seriously limited, or undertaken only by those with a certain special combination of arrogance and masochism (I’m kidding. A little.).
I’m terribly sorry to those who love Thanksgiving, but it’s truly just a brief detour until December and Christmastime. Halloween has a whole season like Christmas; pumpkin patches, costume preparation, haunted houses, scary movies. I can think of exactly two Thanksgiving movies: the Charlie Brown one and a movie based on a Louisa May Alcott short story that my parents somehow own on DVD and that absolutely no one else has seen. Thanksgiving is a seasonal lull between two larger celebrations (although, crucial as a cultural touchstone to the abolitionist movement).
In recent years, it goes even deeper than my aversion to cold, and ambivalence about Thanksgiving. Since I’ve lived in Colorado (going on 11 years now), I’ve developed some pretty excruciating seasonal moody blues. They begin around Halloween and grind me to a halt until the first day in May, when I can finally emerge bare-legged. There is no such thing as “spring” in Colorado. Winter simply slams into summer without much of a segue.
I’ve gotten these blues long enough that I’ve learned to anticipate them. In the fun way mental illness often operates, the anticipation of a 7 month slump creates a well in my well-being for seasonal depression to pour itself into. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the contrast is often made worse by my deep affinity and affection for October. I love the brilliant colors, the rich scents, the crisp air. It all seems to crest in October and collapse in November.
The spring is honestly much, much worse. After the glow of January wears off, I know there’s at least 4 more months of cabin fever (read: misery). March has the highest snow fall of the year on average in Denver. It’s also my birthday month. So November is like a haughty little preview of the monotony to come, reminding me of the (literal) darker days ahead.
My creativity in November and beyond tends to follow my daily mindset: struggling to maintain equilibrium in an environment desperate to tank itself. June or July Blair might consider that equilibrium mediocre, but is truly the most February Blair can do. It’s very difficult to maintain a bright, bubbly social media page when everything in the immediate vicinity is dark and muted. Or brown and slushy.
This is probably why the quote above by Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue struck me so deeply the first time I read it. I saw it in November 2020, perhaps the darkest month of the darkest year I can remember. After years and years of wrestling with my winter demons, it felt like permission I didn’t know I needed. Permission to brace myself from howling cold. Permission to bear it without the added responsibility of a grin.
The poem in its entirety reads:
This is the time to be slow
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light.
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
I always misremember this poem as “The Bitter Wall.” I suppose that’s how I characterize November to myself. A frigid boundary to the next part of the year. Acrid, bleak, unmoving. I don’t have to resist the season so much. I don’t have to fear and loathe and curse it. I can sit down, and use the period of less as a shelter from the howling winds of insecurity, and a world that wants more of me than I have to give.
As I get older, I strive to lean into the beautiful parts of November more. It’s a wonderful time to stretch things out. Spending hours in a warm kitchen making pie or soup or bread. Greeting an early sundown with a warm lamp and a fat book. Sorting my blanket collection in anticipation of friends coming over for movie night (okay fine, Bachelor night).
November doesn’t have to be a bitter wall this year. If I remain generous.
