Current chapter: Mist and the Mountain

Winter Solstice 2024

In a mountain range not far from here, a fine, opaque mist sails effortlessly on thin air towards a hard rock slope, while my mind is stuck on something else. I just lost something I've put a lot of time and effort into, and I've let trouble take its place. 

While I'm busy not accepting my loss, the phone suddenly rings. It’s my dying neighbour dialling in, and she’s in the mood for tea.

For Heidegger, death was more than a closing parenthesis to a series of complications. He found in it a possibility present in every living moment. A definitive possibility of the end of any other possibility we might have. The one thing we cannot somehow overtake, outrun, or outsource. The fact that we do tend to ignore, elude and conceal that possibility he saw confirming its primacy in our condition — and in turn made him argue for the potential to life in admitting the inevitable end.

The mist in the mountain moves steadfast towards the dark rock. Unconflicted by the possibility of the final breakdown, my old and weary friend congratulates me on my large jar of sugar. That glass urn really is big — and dear, does it hold sugar. It’s not that Christa can’t relate to trouble. Born under bombs in Berlin 1942, her series of complications is as unending as anyone’s. I think she simply felt happy to see all that sugar, and I don’t blame her. 

Turning away from our institute of eternal sweetness on the table between us, the view out the window on these darkest days of the year feels more like an end than a beginning. Cold ground, dark sky, all branch, no leaf — and those things I lost are still gone. This is not spring. But it is winter solstice, and who knows where the sweet miracle of time will take us next.

Back on the barren mountain the fog thins quickly against the rock below, as it voluntarily lets go of what it has been. In the awful daring of a moment's surrender the mist resolves into air — and we put some sugar in the tea.