Photo, my own.
During a recent walk I noticed a hornet’s nest in a neighbor’s yard, its size proof of the industry that had occurred beneath the leafy canopy of warmer months. Whether the hornets had toiled away quietly or amid the discordant hum of their own labor, I cannot say. Hornets are not popular in suburbia. That they’d managed to persevere at all alongside wary citizens, leaf blowers, and pesticides was an accomplishment.
I paused to study the decaying nest, imagining hornets flying outward and onward to wherever hornets go. The strange, stark beauty of a dark, ruptured balloon wavering against the sky reminded me why I like walking in winter, when barren tree limbs reveal silent raptors and pristine snowfalls give way to graphite prints of deer, fox, rabbits, and raccoons. When you look and listen closely, proof of life is everywhere.
I spent the early part of winter steeped in my own versions of industry: reviews and planning at work, preparations for small, Covid-era family holiday gatherings, moving some writing projects over the finish line. Then: blessed January—a time for lying fallow between December’s cheery insistence and February’s eye upon spring.
To lie fallow is not the same as inertia; rather, it’s a state of purposeful neglect, a crop rotation intended to restore fecundity. (It’s nice to have your extended sleeptime validated by the Farmer’s Almanac.) Yet plenty still stirs internally in the realm of ideas and intentions: places I hope to see, books I want to read, essays to write, friends and family to reconnect with, recipes to … (cue record scratch).
Somehow these yearnings sound and feel rather saccharine following two years of Covid. We are still living in a global state of high dudgeon with a continuing pandemic, the specter of autocracy abroad (and at home), a worsening climate crisis. Everything has changed: the nest has ruptured and we have been sent scattered into the wind.
I’ll admit I’m partial to minor chords, shadows, and empty parkbenches. Growing up, my disposition was half Charlie Brown, half Wednesday Addams. It’s a good evening whenever a few downward dogs and a cup of chamomile tea succeeds in blunting the edges of my oft-disquieted mind; otherwise I spend many late and early hours staring out my bedroom window, past the treetops and into the night, pondering how things will turn out.
Which is a waste of perfectly good fallowtime … for things always Turn. Out.
What I wish for everyone and anyone from what remains of January, before spring kicks things into high gear, is a pause between old and new, between decay and growth—a suspension in time, however brief—between where we have been, and wherever we are headed.