Winter White: Perspectives on the Season
Lay-Led Service - Janet Demb and Robert Polizer, speakers
Hastings – January 3, 2010

 
Dear Reader.
The following sermon was written to be spoken. It may not follow the conventions of documents which were written to be read. It also will not reflect the energy and nuances of the speaker.
If you can embrace these caveats, please, read on.

 
Speaker - Janet Demb

The days are short, the nights are long. Exactly how I like it. What used to be my least favorite season is now my season of choice and this week’s topic has given me the opportunity to explore why.

 Spring, the season of rejuvenation when early crocuses promise more.  It is a season of anticipation, of waiting, waiting for the school year to end, for days to warm, for buds to bloom, when even I succumb to the pale green blur that blunts tree limbs sharp edges. Spring is a time of waiting and as the years pass I have less time to wait. Spring better suits the young. They look ahead, whole lives before them to be filled with dreams and drama. There is nothing they cannot dream. Nothing they cannot do. The young are heedless and invulnerable and they do not know that spring is fleeting. Their memories do not yet compete with their dreams.

 Summer, the season of long, languorous days, was my favorite for many years. There were punch ball games in Prospect Park and my first kiss. After school let out my family left Brooklyn and headed for the Catskills.  The trip seemed endless and we would stop at Katz’s to be fortified with corned beef sandwiches.  That was before cholesterol counted, but the waiters were just as rude as they are today. Whaddya mean the pastrami’s  fatty? That woman ovah there is fatty.  

 We headed up the west side highway to old Route 17. Our Chevy strained up the Wurtsboro hills, my mother complained about trading the comforts of home for a bungalow, while I focused on the Burma Shave signs along the way. For those of you who do not know, they were a series of five signs always in rhyme, set at regular intervals, designed to be read from a moving car and always ending with Burma Shave, for example, if you have …a lot of stubble…we know how…to save you trouble…Burma Shave. The trip became increasingly rustic as we approached our destination and finally, armed with mop and pail, we arrived. There was no refrigerator, only an ice box and newspapers to catch the drips. Outside were wild flowers, dirt roads, cows, horses and country smells.  When I was young, summer was a time to be outside.

 Later, there were summers as a counselor at a settlement camp and my first summer romance.  Still later, were vacations at the beach: barefoot, halcyon days before sunscreen and surgeon generals.  I rejoiced in shedding long sleeves, warmed to the feel of sun on my skin, returned from the beach, bronzed and sandy. Summer was a time to flower, a time to grow into maturity, a time of sensual pleasure—sea, sand, skin.  This was before air conditioners obscured sultry summer air, and before the fear of ticks and melanoma made me cover up.  Increasingly, I enjoyed the flowers and fireflies from the safety of my screened in porch.

I think you know where I am going with this. Autumn.  I was well into middle age before I could truly appreciate it.  June brides gave way to courtesans.  Rouged and wrinkled, lipstick-ed and henna-ed the trees made a last grand stand. They had experience. This was a season that did not go gently into the good night. 

I have two huge oaks in front of my home--they must be at least a hundred years old.  I would diligently rake their leaves each fall.  It was an opportunity to get outside and do something physical before winter set in.  At some point the ritual lost its luster. After the raking, I felt raked over myself so I hired a gardener armed with a noisy leaf blower.

 I noticed that I no longer took pleasure in handing out candy on Halloween. Candles were too dangerous, so I stopped carving pumpkins and I had no pumpkin seeds to roast. Was I becoming curmudgeonly or had I simply outgrown the season?  I could still appreciate the crunch of a Macoun and the rare trip to New Hampshire along with other leaf peepers, but more and more I anticipated winter with a new eagerness.

 When winter was chosen for this program group, I struggled with the subject and I was not alone. Eva Harper, now in her nineties, indicated that winter came on ever more quickly for her and made her wonder how many more she would be allotted, and Rob Politzer, a young man, remarked that when he looked through the tunnel towards 2010 he did not know if things would be better or worse on the other side. Yet I feared that if I remained true to my feelings about winter, this talk would be depressing and that I would be viewed as an old lady who had lost her zest for life. Well, I will not put a jovial spin on the season to make you merry; just explain why it is that it suits me.

 The days are short, the nights are long. Exactly how I like it.  This is the season for curling up by the fireside with a book.  I need not even read; I can simply watch the flames lick their way up the chimney. I no longer hear the voice of my mother saying it’s a beautiful day, go outside. Winter is a season made for being inside. Some might ask, what about the bulbs in the ground and the promise of new birth in the spring? But it is winter now, a time for paring down, a time for squirrels to live off the acorns they have hoarded, a time for trees to display the spare architecture of bare limbs. The rhythm and pace of this season match my own. 

It is more than just curling up with a book, more than cardinals waiting patiently below the birdfeeder for the sunflower seeds dropped by the chickadees.  Like the metabolism of the hibernating bear, things slow down in the winter and a cave can be a good thing. I make my peace with quiet and the waning light.  Winter helps me turn to personal memories and private thoughts. A certain gray pervades the air and when the first flakes fall, they are soft and still.

Still.  The word is pregnant.  There is the still that means even now, the still that means nevertheless. There are stills for making bootleg whiskey. There are stillborn babies and still life paintings. There is the still that means silent and the still that means and yet.

Winter is a hushed season, a season of interiority, a season for being…still.

Speaker: Robert Polizer

Reflections on Returning Home from My Winter Vacation

I am driving home from a Winter Vacation in Northern Michigan.    We typically stay in a second home owned by my brother and sister in law.   Fred, my brother in law, and I are so different in so many ways.   He is from a large Irish family, a Very religious Catholic and a social conservative.  He is an anti-abortion crusader and we once got into a big argument about physician assisted suicide.  His father was an alcoholic and apparently somewhat abusive.  Fred can be so controlling and so cheap.  It can just drive you nuts to be around him at times.  He is also one of the best fathers I have ever met and he can be selfless and very generous.  His five children are all doing great.  They don’t have that deep emotional hole as children with an absent or abusive father do.  If I or my family were in trouble and needed his help, I have no doubt that Fred would drive his banged up van all the way to New York to help in any way that he could. 

I on the other hand grew up in a small family, just my parents and my sister.  My father was a Cantor in a Reform Jewish Synagogue and a card carrying Communist.  He would come home from High Holiday services, break out the bread and complain about the SOB Rabbi.  He loved Karl Marx, Mozart and Communism but hated almost everything else, including most people.   He wasn’t much of a family man, being to angry, hurt and needy to be able to give much to others…except for his  beloved Communist Party, that he later came to despise and break off from with Angela Davis and her following.  He grew up in Chicago during the depression.  You can take the kid out of the depression but you cant’ take the Depression out of the kid he said many times.   For my part, I have dedicated  my professional life to green building and helping humanity to shift towards a sustainable way of living on this remarkable planet Earth.  I feel very good about this work.  But I can also be so controlling, so cheap and so narcissistic.  Sometimes it just drives me nuts to be around me.

It is snowing quite hard, a virtual white out.  A lighted sign just warned to slow down with the changing weather conditions.  I think that it is probably wise to slow down whenever there are changing weather conditions so I slow down just like the sign sais.   I used to drive fast and sometimes reckless regardless of the weather.   Sometimes I wonder how I have made it to 50 years of age.  Maybe some higher power has protected me, maybe I have just been lucky or maybe I learned to duck.

My emotions have seasons just like the Earth.  The difference is that my emotional seasons change daily, sometimes hourly, sometimes minute by minute.  I’m not sure which emotions I should attribute to which season.  It is so contrived to connect hope with Spring, Happiness with Summer, Regret with Fall and Sadness  or Depression with Winter.   I’m also not so sure that such affiliations work when I can feel any or all of these emotions on the warmest sunny day of summer or the coldest darkest day of winter.    Just today I have felt anger at the pathetic supreme continental breakfast at the Red Roof Inn (not only did they not have bananas for the corn flakes, but no outmeal, no waffle maker and no boiled eggs. After breakfast I felt a surge of hope when I read an email from an architect we are working with on a project who reassured me that we would be paid soon. I felt regret when we abandoned hope of having lunch at Panera Bread but then a burst of happiness when we found an excellent Italian Restaurant near Dubois, PA.  The salad actually had romaine lettuce in it and the eggplant parm was PERFECTO.  

We just passed Exit 192 for Jersey Shore, PA.  There was a sign for gas stations available at this stop including BP which stands for British Petroleum but what the company now likes to refer to as Beyond Petroleum.  The BP logo, has a central sun-like image with rays that change from yellow to green.  I am happy to know that a large oil company like BP is supposedly evolving beyond petroleum but angry about the greenwashing BS from a company responsible for releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gasses every year.  I am hopeful for new energy technologies like biodiesel from algae but depressed at the reality of rapidly receding glaciers and polar ice caps and for the reality that I know in my bones is much worse than any of us really wants to contemplate.

After driving 6 hours through Ohio and PA we are crossing over the Delaware Water Gap into New Jersey.   The scene is so beautiful with the Delaware River meandering around the steep carved out cliffs of rock that are hundreds of millions of years old.  I am in awe.  How long did it take for that river to gently cut through that solid rock?  As the Tao Te Ching sais, “there is nothing more powerful than water…”  I have some very thick rocks within me holding a bunch of old emotional baggage.   Years of hammering and blasting have not necessarily opened up these rocks so maybe I will try to use a softer, more water-like approach at cracking through some of this bedrock and clearing out the contamination.

We are now crossing the George Washington Bridge.  It seems like we have been driving for years and yet  the whole 15 hour trip went by like a blink of the eye.   Life at 50 feels a lot like that.   I look over at downtown Manhattan and I am filled with so many feelings and emotions.  All of the seasons are turning within me.  Happiness at getting close to our beloved Inwood and sadness at the inevitable conflicts that I will face in trying to build in the midst of this congested zoo of a city, hope with the new projects that we have just gotten and concern for what some terrorist group is planning.

Slowing down as we turn the corner at Seaman Avenue and 218^th Street for home, it occurs to me that my Brother in Law Fred and I really are not nearly as different as I once had thought.  I have seen Fred experience his emotional cycles and seasons but he just keeps them under raps more than I do.  His strong feelings about abortion and the threat to the unborn child are really quite similar to my feelings about Climate Change and the threat to my children and to civilization as a whole.  Fred is seeking his ultimate home in his fatherly devotion to his family and what he deeply believes are the loving arms of Jesus Christ his savior   I used to feel threatened by this belief of his but now I respect him for it because he lives it.  And anyway, do we not all spring from the same source?

Well, It is nice to be home, back from my Winter Vacation, and ready to live to my fullest capacity in this new year of 2010.

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