Esteemed Reader of Our Magazine:

To begin again. A new season calls, in the lone bird song from the deep woods, in the young green shoots jutting through the garden's winter kill, in the rush of spring stars that rise at midnight. We have waited, with patience and despair, and now it is finally upon us, externally and in the spirit.

The germs of life contained within hard, protective seed pods (dropped by the maples last summer or sown by our own hands in the fall) have begun to stir. Warmth can be felt. The war of light and dark seems to tip in our favor. Soon enough, the leaves and blossoms will burst forth, and plans, conceived in the long night of winter, also. Why is there a subtle tingling of the nerves, a mix of anxiety and hope? What exactly is it that we wait for?

I suppose for many of us, a kind of questioning rides with the break-up of the rigid, frozen forms of survival. To take stock, to see what needs to be refilled and what thrown out, is part of it. Winter food does not happily feed spring blood. But there seem to be deeper issues. What does it take to feel really alive again—to shuck the dead, stale taste of routine answers that kept us winter-warm—and where do we come into the act? Sometimes it just happens, a simple gift. A project, cause, or love comes along to shake us out of a drowsy afternoon (thinking of past mistakes) and to take us by the hand, pulling us off dead center, the doldrums of a soul, where we had sat for weeks or months on end.  It can come as a subtle event barely noticed out of the corner of an eye like the smile of a stranger across a crowded room. Or it can be a seismic event (8.9 on the Richter scale!) not to be overlooked, and instantly the blood pounds in the chest, the nose takes in fresh fragrances of the earth, and we feel the beauty of this life—this only life. We then drink from the font and are made young once more.

It is the impulse to begin again that interests me. There is a literal mind that mixes it up with a wish for the youth of happy days. In a story of a Greek hero, Adonis' lover, we read how he wished never to die and asked the goddess Artemis for immortality. But because he forgot to consider his body, he grew physically older and more decrepit, living into old age and beyond—a shriveled dote of a man, and finally, a grotesque ball of cells.

I wonder how often the impulse to begin anew is blended with a denial of the old, a past that repels and brings despair. The wish is masked by other things. It is really for a clone, the same life but without any offending feature and with a future cosmetically improved.

Perhaps it isn't yet time to quit winter and its ambiguities. In the cold and fear of a stormy night lies the courage to embrace the dark. I suppose it is connected with a buried awareness (partially buried, at least) of rest and of fertility—of the secret of growth. Winter brings in the reign of the White Goddess, as Robert Graves describes her, who is the terrifying life-force, destroyer as well as creator. Her arctic breath, her crushing teeth of ice, and her snowy tresses that whip across our face, drive life to its lowest ebb—make it suspend its metabolic processes. She who must be endured so that real hope can begin: it is she who is behind the seasonal theft of vitality, value, even consciousness as we know it. She is the teacher whose lesson we face.

The lesson is about cost. That the cost of beginning again is daunting (because our attachment to life is very strong) is hard to grasp. The homework starts with a look at a kind of hope we feel when nothing at all is promised. Then, stripped naked, we are almost as helpless as an infant. Everything is back in question. There is only the call of new life and that part in us that can listen. That is the lesson of a winter now passing (but is not yet past). It is that about which the poet Grace Paley writes:

and a girl with no name naked
wearing the last nakedness of
childhood breathed in me
once no
two breaths
a sigh  she whispered  Hey you
begin again
Again?
again  again  you'll see
it's easy  begin again  long ago

—David Appelbaum