Birches

Hey everyone!

It's finals time, and I'm freezing. I'm always freezing during the winter and I don't know why. It's more than just normal cold. It's freezing. I'm convinced my body is half a degree colder than everyone else's body. I walked outside yesterday in the snow for 5-10 minutes max, and once I got home I couldn't feel my feet. So I try to avoid being outside during the winter for this very reason.

Nevertheless, I really like Christmas/holiday-time. Technically, I'm Jewish, but I just love Christmas. I love the lit-up trees, the snow that falls in beautiful little flurry flakes, soft and magical (this is obviously before it turns into that gross, brown slush on the street). I love presents and Christmas music (although I can only stand it for about 2 weeks before I go a little crazy). I feel like the holidays are meant to break up the awful monotony that can grip us during the winter season. It ushers students out of the fall semester and into winter break. I can't help but feel jolly, even as I struggle to complete all my papers and exams in the next two weeks. *sob*

The other day I went to the Guggenheim for the ZERO exhibit. It's a really cool postmodern exhibit focusing on experimental European art of the 50's and 60's. I went on a Friday night when it was raining, an hour before the museum closed. With my Cultural Passport, I got free admission (saved like $22). It was a quiet and rainy night, dark and beautiful in the park adjacent to the museum. It's a truly introspective experience to see this exhibit. It encompasses the whole museum, and as you spiral up the walkway, you experience a progression of thematic expression by the movement, culminating in this beautiful mechanical light show that is just ethereal. It's haunting but really calming at the same time. I would recommend this exhibit for anyone who just wants a relaxing break from finals; it kind of helped me relax enough to confront all the jumbled tasks I had stored in my mind that week.

As I left the museum, it was raining and dark, very quiet on 5th avenue along the park. The UES is really quiet at night, especially when it's raining, since there's not much to attract foot traffic.The winter is a difficult time to take long, slow walks. I inherently rush everywhere just to get out of the cold. I walked slow and took some time to think. I don't really do this enough, but it was quiet and still enough in the city for me to slow down and take everything in. I walked parallel to the park for awhile.

Last night when it snowed, I walked a bit as well. I saw the trees lined in snow and just absorbed the beauty of that for awhile. This time of year reminds me a lot of Robert Frost's poems "Birches" and "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening" (which is a personal favorite; fun fact: I memorized and recited it in second grade). Frost's poetry had stayed with me since I first encountered it when I was 7, and again in my senior year of high school. It is quiet and nuanced in its attention to nature's details. I really appreciate this type of poetry, as a break from the inherently political tone of most poems. Recently I've been reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine; the book is well-timed, what with Ferguson and the Garner case, but the weight of that narrative is heavy and painful. Sometimes I need to take a step back and read some poetry that talks about the beauty of the world and our place in it. Just looking at the snow on the trees can be curative. Being at home gives me this feeling; in comparison to the crazy energy of the city, it's quiet and there's a beauty in all of the small time pockets that exist there. Time is different at home than in the city. But I think it's important to find a curative place everywhere you go. Taking walks never seemed like my thing, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

I'll leave you with "Birches" by Robert Frost, in the hopes that just reading it will give you the feeling I experienced when I looked at the bare trees coated with white snow.

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay 
As ice-storms do.  Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain.  They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.  He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground.  He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return.  Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.