Taming the Ox: Buddhist Stories and Reflections on Politics, Race, Culture, and Spiritual Practice

I am determined not to miss winter this year.

I can’t speak for other regions, but in New England, winter’s contradictory nature has always struck me as a little otherworldly. It’s both sparkly and dull. It has a stale quality, sporadically interspersed with freshness. It’s both the death and rebirth of the year.

I have always thought there was great potential in the experience of winter, some kind of great insight that could give way to a new kind of transcendence. Unfortunately, I don’t know what it is, as I seem to miss it every year due to a tendency to shy away from any discomfort and indulge only in the cozier, more comforting aspects of the season. I treat uncomfortable weather as somehow wrong, like comfortable weather gone awry.

This is a privileged problem, to be sure. I am neither ill nor disabled. I live in a safe neighborhood, loosely-populated. I am not homeless. I am not trapped inside or outside. Still, I always seem to succumb to one key feature of winter: isolation.

This year, that cannot happen.

I think many people are familiar with the Zen Buddhist term wabi-sabi, which Johnson describes as “simultaneously mystical and practical...art that provides a direct, intuitive insight into truth...wabi (things fresh, simple, and quiet) and sabi (things radiating beauty with age)...a preference for such features as imperfection, impermanence, immediacy, the idiosyncratic, the incompleteness, modesty, and humility.”*

If my understanding of Zen Buddhism is incomplete, my understanding of wabi-sabi is almost non-existent. But there’s something about this slightly mystical season that feels so...direct. It cuts through the haze I feel when I wake up and can’t shake the feeling that I’m about to live the same day that I did yesterday.

I would guess that this is the same haze that has been over many of us since March: an unsavory mixture of dread, boredom and a desperation to be on the other side of both.

This winter must be different. This year, I cannot seek the company of others. It is imperative that I be intentional in my experience of this season, to find potential in this not-so-ordinary winter through my ordinary mind.

It may happen through my frustration with the passing of the days, which have grown hard and stale. It may happen through my loneliness and isolation and fear of both.

Yesterday, I took a walk through the woods, inhaling air so cold it stung the inside of my nose. When I reached the pond at the edge of the woods, I took off my shoes and stood with my bare feet in the muddy, icy water.

At first, there was only the cold, sharp and clear. Then I looked across the water. In a moment, I felt the sparse sunlight turn from shimmer on the water to warmth on my face. I was at once dissolved and expanded, pulled down into the earth and up to the sky. The connection lingered, then weakened. Then it was gone. It left an ache in its place, as though it had not quite been completed.

I dried my feet, put on my shoes and walked back to my car.

*From “The Dharma and the Artist’s Eye” the first essay in Charles Johnson’s Taming the Ox: Buddhist Stories and Reflections on Politics, Race, Culture, and Spiritual Practice.

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