Ice in my Coffee

By Pam Hadder

PHOTO CREDIT: Bing Wright, Broken Mirrors series

Winter is closing in – arrow heads of geese soar skyward, directing their efforts south. Although it’s tempting to slip into denial when the midday sun warms my hair, the breeze on my bare face soon delivers a frigid wakeup call.  With each minute of daylight lost, I know I’m drawing on precious reserves from summer’s fiery bounty.  And yet last winter, amid the coldest winter on record in 125 years, I felt my heart surge with love – the colder it got, the hotter my fire burned. I can’t explain it in words and I haven’t reached a point where I can write music or capture those feelings with visual imagery, but it appears that after years of griping about the cold and snow, I have a developed an abiding passion for winter.

Exhaling into this chilly morning, I watch my frozen breath hovering in a free-form cloud around my head. For a brief moment it is like time stands still, and I witness my recent past expressed as a vapourous sculpture, which soon dissipates into the environment.  Like my frozen breath, human life is precious and yet insignificant in universal timelines. We emerge for a minuscule blip, and then are returned to the vast energized anonymity from which we emerged – reunited with a nebulous, ever-evolving, expanding life force.

I consider all that I know and love about winter – it is the blank canvas allowing for reflection and creative newness, it is the crisp jolt of air that challenges but affirms my stubborn resilience, and it is the stark beauty of branches against brilliant white snow drifts and deep blue skies.  Winter is dream time; rebuild and reset time – it is a time where we collect resources and review what to keep, what to give away, what to build, and we need to keep warm.  The cold requires us to move swiftly – to generate and sustain heat. We know from past experience that we do well to warm our core with comfort food and beverages. But most of all we need to keep the mind brightly lit with possibilities, using our ingenuity and stoking our personal fires to counter the sun’s waning favour.

Each year as the winter solstice approaches, I seek my New Year mantra.  Early winter marks the end of the incubation period, the third trimester – as such, I anticipate new life and I wonder, “What shall I name this new being, what will it look like, will I be equipped to attend to its needs?” What lessons and wisdom will come my way in the weeks ahead? In the past the mantras came to me unbidden; a gift from the cosmos landed with an unceremonious thunk on my unsuspecting consciousness! Typically the mantra took the form of a word or short phrase upon which I would reflect and then would seek deeper meaning and engagement. However, once I was attuned to this marvel, early winter became a time of anticipation and seeking – I was aware, so the delivery method was more subtle.  I was being encouraged to wake up and shift from patterns which did not hold meaning or value – the universe was making me work a little because I had the ability to do so.

Last year, however, the mantra process was exceedingly difficult – was the universe being fickle and withholding pearls of wisdom, or I was too distracted and desperate to see through the clutter? Had I lost my ability to discern subtlety? Or perhaps, I was being encouraged to seek, to move, to extend myself outward from this place of “me” of the personal mind?  Maybe I needed to understand my ability to flex muscle, to stretch, to discover and to prosper. I needed to break away from barriers that I feared, and in some cases, was so accustomed to that I could not see how they held me captive.

Nonetheless, the more earnestly I sought to connect, to forge, and to bond, the more disconnected I felt from that embrace.  At this point, I sometimes feel in tune with a joyous surge – I know there is more, and I know there is a reason for my insatiable striving, and everything seems possible, even easy. I have no fear or apprehension, just pensive, well-managed curiosity about the days to come and how I might prepare to receive understanding and to achieve the best results.

Recently, mentally and physically weary after a long working day, I tucked into my covers with Netflix, and I watched a 2011 documentary called “Happy.”  The film examines the roots of human happiness, interviewing researchers and examining cultures from around the world.  Happy asserts that happiness is 50% genetic-based, 10% environment-based and 40% action-based.  Additionally a number of key factors are known to affect our ability to be happy: supportive relationships (most commonly family and friends; community), and altruism (our ability to step outside of ourselves and care for others before our own needs). Additionally, there is a need for us to engage in those things that bring us joy and deep personal satisfaction – things that if we were not interrupted, we would continue to engage in for hours on end.  One researcher, pyschologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has coined a term for this state: FLOW. I have purchased Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's books (Amazon) "Flow" and "Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention." These books aren't new - Csikszentmihalyi has been researching human happiness for decades and "Flow" was first printed back in 1990. However, I am eager to gain access to his findings and to incorporate that wisdom into my current engagements.

As I breathe in the warm air of this room, with diffused light flooding over my left shoulder, I suddenly know my mantra: it is simply, EXHALE. To exhale is to give over, to simultaneously connect and exchange energy physically and beyond the physical.  It means to empty the lungs of expended air, allowing for newness and ultimately for life. I understand that with newness the old must fall away - there are always choices and decisions that challenge and confound us. At this moment, I am enjoying one small breath: it flutters like a clumsy moth fumbling toward a soft light. I look out the window, and I sip the coffee that has grown cold.