The saddest season

(This isn’t meant to be sad, but it’s about being sad. Fair warning.)

They say that about this time of year is the saddest season. There is the most discontent, frustration and depression, due in part (in these northern climes) to the onset of cabin fever from the cold, and lack of vitamin D from that sweet-feeling sun, and the shortness of the days. The increase in darker hours gives power to the darker sides of our souls, or perhaps just makes us more aware of them. Suicides go up this time of year. It's an important thing to keep in mind, if you start feeling erratically.

I'm typically immune to the negative effects of this season. I'm never one of those complaining "I've had enough of the snow. I'm ready for warmer weather." To the contrary, I love the snow, even when I've got to shovel it alone. On top of that, so many elements of my life have been feeling like they're coming dramatically, miraculously, dramatically, amazingly together, this season. I’d been starting to succumb to something that I couldn’t quite name, and then just sort of stepped out of it into a patch of sunlight that seemed to go on forever. Coming back from New York, I was on a high. It made me invulnerable. The perception of invulnerability makes you stupid.

The other day I was burning a CD of some music, and started making (what I called) liner notes, talking about what the music said to me, and what it brought to mind. Some of the songs were pretty sad, and I kind of bummed myself out. Before I realized what I was doing, in accessing recollection, I didn't merely recall, but brought myself there. Big T says it often, knocking his hand to his head, "Oh, why do I have to have such a big imagination!." And he's only half kidding. For me, a vivid imagination and the ability to transport myself somewhere else, and somewhen else, is something I treasure. But it's like the Animorphs book series that Big T was into couple of years back—where kids can transform themselves into animals, as long as they don't stay in that form for more than an hour. If they do, they could be stuck there.

I may not love the blues, but I sure as hell understand them. I get why someone would write a piece of music so sad it’d break your heart, and more, I understand why someone else would listen to it. Sad music, for some reason, can have a countering effect on sadness. The heart can be like a filled balloon,pulled down into a cold ocean of sadness, down, down, by the music. Then, suddenly, at it's lowest point, it's released, and the heart flies toward the surface, not just to it but beyond it.The heart floats, and then it soars. It's like that old joke of hitting yourself in the hand with a hammer, because it feels so good when you stop. There’s something cathartic about sadness, something soothing in knowing you can still feel, from one end of the gamut to the other, that all the emotive faculties are still there and primed and in working order. I think, therefore I am; I feel, therefore I am more.

But it's not a healthy place to live. It's a tropical beach you fall asleep on, that's a desert on awakening-disorienting, and full of constantly changing perspectives. The heart's like a fine piece of old porcelain, with intricate and delicate patterns etched along its lines. When it breaks, it shatters. And being too precious to leave that way, you pick it up, and meticulously work at repairing it, searching the floor for each minute shard, carefully glueing and removing the excess and letting time and care do it's work, until it's repaired. Good as new. But, as careful as you are, there are still those hairline cracks along its form, still those edges of white where the glazing has been lost, revealing the fracture beneath. It's strong, repaired, renewed, but still changed through the experience. Blue music is about tracing those lines, and remembering the experience of shattering and renewal. And somehow, sometimes, that commisseration with evocative emotion aids recovery.

But, again, it's not a good place to stay. A long evening drive (pardon my greenhouse gasses) and listening to a new William Shatner CD actually shook me out of it pretty effectively. I stepped from the car at my house, and looked around at the trees and the black, starless sky. Instantly, I'm high again, breaking the surface to rise into the air, and the sky is a bright, dazzling, golden white, and warm and crisp,smack in the middle of the saddest season.

Sure, I'll go back there again, to that dark place, that place that calls to memory and demands recognition. It's a nice place to visit.

But I don't want to live there.