Sleepless

It’s not quite five in the morning and I’ve been up for awhile now. The wind is howling with a storm coming in, and an internal restlessness accompanies it. I have no plans for the coming day, so it’s as good a time for a sleepless night as I could wish. I’m thankful for that, and thankful that it doesn’t happen often.

Poetry seems like a better option than Netflix, so I turn to Robert Nathan’s A Winter Tide to find an old favorite:

III

It would be wiser, since we live in fear,

To use our sorrows to correct our ways.

If winter be the color of our days,

Then learn of winter to be still and clear.

The greener spring, the new and happy year

Is not for us but for birds to praise;

It is the snow that over autumn lays

Its quiet hand that is our teacher here.

For see, it has its lessons for the soul:

Look how the tree with piety keeps fast

The bud and blossom hidden in the bole.

So bear the winter with its frosty blast,

And seek, beneath the season of our grief,

The spring unending and the waiting leaf.

[Nathan, Robert; A Winter Tide, III; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940, p. 5]

Letting go of what doesn’t matter: fear

Loving what does: Learning of winter to be still and clear

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