Micro Seasons: Ice Forms On The Sea

The harbour begins to freeze, edges first.

I love the Japanese concept of ‘Micro Seasons’ because weather is so many more things than just winter, spring, summer, and fall! Also, I want more than four chances a year to to treat those seasonal changes with the appropriate amount of reflection and gravitas. So I made a list of micro seasons relevant to where I live¹, and wrote a prompt and tiny ritual² to accompany each one.

Feel free to join me in marking our way through these next 12 months together via these micro seasons! I plan to use each one as a lens: Like, what did the calendar say to look for? Is it here yet? And what does the prompt help me surface?

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December 22 – January 5: Ice Forms on the Sea

Prompt: Where are you frozen, and what rests safely in quiet?

The mental image of ice freezing on the edges of a rushing river is much more relatable to me than I wish it was. For starters, I spend a lot of my day very physically still³. Also, I tend to alternate between feeling like I will never get started on anything at all and working at breakneck speed on three things at once. Even still I can’t get caught up. I’m always behind on so many deadlines, sometimes by a few hours and sometimes by a few years.

With all of the demands of the store — which more often than not I don’t work on directly but I still obsess over — I feel like everything is rushing along alongside frozen me. Going downstairs for a visit is a lot like stepping into a creek. It was moving before I got there and it will keep moving after I leave.

When I think of the first part of the prompt: “Where are you frozen?”, the first thing that comes to mind is the giant list of bookkeeping tasks that makes me feel like I am going to throw up. This paralysis is so powerful that over the past two months I have made fantastic progress on a couple of other tasks I thought I’d be stuck on forever. A great reminder that nothing gets me to do something faster than not wanting to do something else even more!

For example, I recently made phenomenal progress on our apartment. I had a magical three hour phone call with my chosen sister Jessica Kaya before Christmas, during which I reorganized nearly every room in my house. What was my office is now a little sitting room, my bedroom now has a vanity that used to be my desk, and I put my kitchen back the way I had it two years ago because I liked it so much better that way and can’t at all remember why I changed it. All of these changes have made my life so much better, and it was such a joy to have a big hangout day with Jess on the phone. It almost felt like when we’d take turns sitting on each other’s beds while the other cleaned around them.

Also! I (perhaps obviously) finally got very unstuck on this newsletter. You might not be able to tell by the long stretches between at my updates, but I really spend so much time working on this dang thing and thinking about it! I can’t even tell you how many times I have opened up a new tab and written two-thirds of an entry, and then abandoned it because I thought of something else I thought I should write about instead —tor because I’d trapped myself trying to pull together something so exhaustive in its detail and backstory that I didn’t even know what I was trying to do anymore. I have spend the last couple of weeks making and scrapping a ton of plans of how to fix this, and I finally came up with a plan that I think is going to go great⁴. I didn’t make a big announcement post about it because I one thing I’ve learned since buying this building is that it’s better to do things than to tell people you are about to start to do things.

Anyway, the second part of this prompt is “What rests safely in quiet?” and I struggled with that for quite a while (note that I am writing this entry during the last half hour of this micro season⁵).

Then I realized that what rests safely in quiet is the fact that that those who love me are more or less going to keep on loving me. For example, Haritha and drove to Halifax in a storm and stayed overnight at Natalie and Jairus’s last week. Even though we hadn’t seen them for a while,⁶ it was just so dang effortless in a way that instantly reset to our nervous systems. We stayed up too late, showed each other videos on YouTube, cheered on each other’s projects, ate a lot of Gruyère scalloped potatoes — and worked to internalize that these friendships are solid even when little else feels like it is.

I’ve also been reminded of the warmth and trust and reliability of our relationships at our last few Crafternoons. Being able to develop those steady friendships so close to our chosen home feels like winning the lottery.

Oh wow I’m so thankful for this prompt! Because honestly without being forced to think of something, I probably would have just insisted that literally nothing was “resting safely in quiet” and that was the root of all of my problems.

I’m also so thankful to anyone who is cheerfully along for this newsletter ride wherein I sent you nothing for six months at a time and then started sending things every other day. Buckle in for more!

1. I’m sure a lot of these will be inaccurate! I did my best.

2. You gotta follow the Instagram for the ritual, it’s to much for here!

3. Pinned in place by cats while my bladder cries out for acknowledgement.

4. Maybe it is even already going great??

5. A deadline admittedly completely fabricated by me.

6. Okay except for they had also visited us the day before.