In praise of winter mornings
A lot of people don’t like the winter. The dearth of light and abundance of cold sucks the life out of them and they go dormant or worse, they go dark. In the north at its deepest the dark of winter comes like a shock to newcomers, whose experiences may have steeled them against the cold but not against the oppressiveness that comes with endless days of twilight. It’s a hard thing to overcome and for many it’s the first and last straw that sends them racing south toward the light — many never to return.
If you stay long enough or take the time to learn its secrets, the dark can be a comforting and welcome friend, a steady and mysterious presence in whose absences creativity can flourish and halflights and alpenglows more appreciated because of their enhanced ability to shine.
For me, one of the true delights of winter in Alaska are the mornings, sometimes bitterly cold, sometimes calm, sometimes thrashed with wind and snow and rain but always cloaked in a heavy blanket of darkness that like an old dog picks up and leaves only when it’s good and damn well ready.
There’s magic in these long winter mornings when even the sun sleeps in and you can languidly sip coffee without feeling the smell of burned daylight wafting into your brain, without having to worry about the missed moments or untaken opportunities or leaps of faith you should be making and instead just let the volume of the day build imperceptibly with a dreamy slowness that seems like loafery but you don’t care about the drag, you don’t become impatient because it’s still morning and all is possible as long as you let it come in its own time and in its own way.
You’re free to let your mind wander during these mornings, and with this freedom comes calmness and introspection. With their plans and timetables and ambitions, summertime mornings are the frenzied warm-up to a manic CrossFit session; winter’s daybreak is a hot yoga session followed by a shower and a nap.
As a writer I love having the space in my head to let ideas draw themselves out or for arguments to bounce around without the pressure of a deadline or the need to produce, and it’s in these winter mornings I find it’s easiest to let my mind wander without consequence. The sun rises with such delicacy sometimes that it feels like you’ve turned on the slow motion setting and all the hours you could ever need are there stretched in front of you like an endless salad bar of optimism. I can’t tell you if my compositions are any better during these mornings, but I can say without a doubt my thoughts are more composed and unhurried than in summer, when any failure to squeeze the most possible effort out of every single moment is a death in the family.
I love summertime and the energy it brings, the way it turns the city from sleepy to supersonic in the blink of a few green weeks of spring. But it’s these slow jazzy mornings, with their brooding melancholy, their hot chocolate digressions, their wonders unexpected like pastry filling; it’s these I think I might like the best of them, and it’s these I hope I remember when the sun returns to its throne.
Matt Tunseth is a freelance writer and photographer from Alaska. Write to him at matthew.tunseth@gmail.com
