Jenifer’s Journal: Hibernation

Long sleeps the summer in the seed. — Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The day after Valentine’s, I stood at my kitchen window in the early morning, looking out over a pristine field of snow — a Valentine’s frosting from the day before. The view would’ve stretched in an unbroken vista from my house clear over to Route 114 except for the black ribbon of Midway that the snowplow had just revealed next to, oh, yeah, the “picturesque” ruin of my split rail fence and that bread line of scraggly stalks that constitute the winter version of my neighbor’s hedge. And, a queue of trees lifting their naked branches in fruitless hosannas to the steely sky.

O.K. not a “vista.”

When I begin to over-write that badly, it must really be winter. And that was 10 days ago, and it’s still very much winter, and the robust resolutions of the New Year seem disappointingly faded and far away.

No wonder that groundhog bit Mayor Bloomberg back in 2009. No wonder that this year, in spite of the cloud cover, Punxsutawney Phil insisted on dooming us to six more weeks of it.

Good grief, I mean groundhogs are hibernators!  Talk about your rude awakenings! To be in the shank of your yearly torpor and be ripped out of it, held up by the scruff of your neck and dangled in front of an unruly crowd of cloddish humans? 

Lucky he didn’t make it 12 more weeks.

Animals hibernate for two practical reasons: staying warm and avoiding starvation during the frigid winter months. There’s something kind of seductive about it, though, being cocooned away from conscious thought or activity for eight to 12 weeks, not worried about the price of heating oil or gas, or slipping in the driveway, driving in the snow, or COVID-19. However, though science is looking to apply its benefits to everything from health care to space travel, strictly speaking, humans don’t hibernate.

Some of us, however, feel that we’ve been in a kind of forced, four-season hibernation for two years. This pandemic has truncated our work lives, our social lives, our personal lives, our goods and services, our kids’ educations, and there’s been nothing “seductive” about it. Increased anxiety, alcoholism, insomnia (the Cleveland Clinic has a name for it: “Coronasomnia”), weight gain and work issues.

In so many ways our lives have ground to a halt in what may seem like a murky, unpleasant place that’s simply not on the map.

For some of us, though, perhaps there’s been an upside. Maybe we’ve learned something about the joys of Zoom meetings, or meditation, for instance, or how much we still love to read, or how to play bridge, or what a thrill it is to find long-forgotten treasures when we finally have had the time to clean out closets and junk drawers.

Howard Thurman, author/philosopher/educator, spoke of this kind of hibernal period: “The time is not wasted. The time of fallowness is a time of rest and restoration, of filling up and replenishing. It is the moment when the meaning of all things can be searched out, tracked down, and made to yield the secret of living.”

In any event, we’re into March now and, especially for seniors, there’s no better place than Shelter Island to do our waking up.

Thanks to the Senior Center and the Shelter Island Library, there are all kinds of activities for us to wake up to.

The Center’s Directer Laurie Fanelli tells me that aside from the Silver Circle social group, and the Dinner Bell, which re-opened in February, there’s Mah-jongg on Mondays, great movies being shown every Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., chair yoga on Wednesdays, watercolor and “stretch and movement” classes coming in March, and the iconic Senior Center bus will soon be on “the road again.” 

Check for details online — shelterislandtown.us/senior-summary — or call the Center at 631-749-1059.

The library, too, offers a wealth of programs and activities both on Zoom and in-person from intermediate French classes, to The Art Rich Poetry Roundtable, to Friday Night Dialogues among them. For details go to shelterislandpubliclibrary.org.

Whether or not this time of “human hibernation” has seemed to serve any discernible purpose, as the lion morphs into a lamb this month, you may find yourself becoming aware of what author Mrs. Humphrey Ward advised in her Amiel’s Journal: “If you are conscious of something new — thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being — do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow, and not a word of your happiness to anyone!”