A month ago, driving to Fox Point in her sage Subaru, my friend Gabriella asked me an unremarkable question, spurred by the melting ice on the ground and the approaching shift in sunset time. 

What was my favorite season? I started with fall, the relief of crisp, smoky air, the goldening leaves. But, no, spring (if it weren’t for my horrible pollen allergy), a breath of warmth, peeking of buds. Then summer, of course, bursting of green, dinner outside in the fading golden light. 

But winter: never winter—I stopped. Winter, time of early darkness, biting bitter wind, freezing rain. Winter was the only given: my favorite season always shifts, depending on our current position in the year and how I felt on any given day. But never has it been winter.

It was that time of day when afternoon light is strongest, slanting sideways but not yet setting, gazing in through west-facing windows. For the first time, perhaps ever, I stopped to consider the winter.

Just before dusk. The sky bruised at the edges with deep blue, clouds a shadow of gray, but light enough still. The crows absolutely fill the sky, spiraling with each other. It feels as if they always already were, these crows in flight, filling the sky with an unending, otherworldly crying. It is a cacophony of sound and sight, not a murmuration (these are not starlings) but almost. That same sense of schooling fish, of bodies moving in relation to each other. Gather is too gentle a word. 

They settle together on the bare branches of a tree, and then

pause

seem to explode, as if startled, circle, flow to their next tree. All crowing. 

There are two layers of flight here: the individual, flapping and diving between and around the trees, and the collective, the slow swell of the community. In aggregate, there is a slowness built into the frantic motion, the screaming caws.

And then, just as quickly, it’s over. The sun is set, the sky is dark, the crows are gone, or settled. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never seen them after dark. Before this winter, I had never noticed them at all.

There is a ritual about it: the gathering takes place every evening, in the same trees along Prospect Street, above the great green dome of the Church of Christ, Scientist. The same time each day—bird time. The crows must know something. Maybe they communicate with each other, maybe they are attuned to the setting of the sun, the falling of night.

The first time I saw the crows, earlier this semester, I was stopped in my tracks in the middle of the sidewalk by the spectacle of the thing. I lost myself for a long moment, grinning at the sky like an idiot, pulled out only by someone else walking in the other direction with their head tilted toward the sky. We shared a quiet smile.

Since then, walking home down Brown Street, or looking out the back window of the Leung Gallery, I find a comfort in the regularity of the crows. It’s a moment of regular awe: when the crows fill the sky, when the boundaries of the human and the more-than-human bump up against one another. Remarkable in its unremarkability, its consistency. It locates me in time and space, even quite literally. I recently realized (ridiculously) that the crows don’t have to shift around daylight savings, that their sense of time and the setting sun is untethered from our standardizing systems.

I’m sure there’s a reason the crows gather at that time, some biological imperative, but I haven’t bothered to learn it. Not knowing lends a sense of mystery, of magic, of ceremony to the crows. I like to imagine that what they do is more play than anything else. 

I wondered more often about why I had never noticed them before, these crows that so captivated me. And, sitting in the car with Gabriella, I made a guess. I stopped to consider the winter: this clean, clear light, the bright, clear sky at noon. The sky never clearer than after a blizzard, the light never brighter than when bouncing off snow. The sun never so golden, perhaps, as at its coldest. A quality to some degree uncapturable in words. 

The trees, leafless, branches fractals of negative space where the sky seeps through. The sky never bigger, never quite so much. Some opening in the closing of the life cycle of the tree, the dropping and withering of leaves: rest for the trees.

This, I guessed, is why I see the crows: without leaves, the crows settling between the branches are more visible than ever before. Without this season, would I have noticed the crows amidst the swaying greenery? What I had before thought of as a loss, of barrenness, became something newly full. 

Here, maybe, in a southward winterly migration, a gift from winter. 

“I think I just really love living in seasonality,” I answered finally, deciding I had no answer. Deciding the winter had something for me in it too. I love living in seasonality not just for the gifts each season brings—new growth; full bloom; fiery decomposition; the crows in the big, wide sky—but also for the very fact of change and that we are granted a season of rest. Don’t get me wrong: I could not be more grateful for the warming air. But isn’t it true? Without the cold, would my gratitude run so deep?

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Where does the ritual live? 

Is it in the setting up of the silver candlesticks, at least eighteen minutes before sunset? One pair sturdy, tall, from my dad’s mom; the other, delicate, from April 1994, bought by my grandma and my mom together. The sheet of foil laid out ceremoniously beneath, the white candles waiting to be lit.

Is it in the cup of red wine, filled so near to the brim that the balancing act is as much of the performance as the reciting of prayer? The silver engraved Kiddush cup from my parents’ wedding, the prayer passed from my dad (his halting Hebrew a testament to his commitment to my mom) to me (my speedy recital a testament to six years of Jewish day school).

It could start the day before, the blooming yeast, the kneading of flour into oil and honey, the swelling dough. The careful weaving of the dough, holding strands like holding hands. This one is a ritual old and new: one of my earliest memories, made each week in preschool, but also a forgotten memory. For me and my dad, it is a ritual borne of the pandemic. When I finally left home after months of quarantine, our Friday texts would be marked by photos of this week’s loaves, plus commentary. Today I made my first challah of my own, in my kitchen at school with a friend who is rediscovering her own Judaism. Kneading dough into life.

Is it in the prayer, the song, a thread through millenia? The gathering, the coming together around a beautiful table and a steaming home-cooked meal? 

Or maybe it’s the rest. On the seventh day, we rest. I try to rest. For a day, we allow ourselves a hibernation, a release, a moment of wintering. 

For years, Shabbat was a burden. Friday evenings, I would be drawn inevitably, unhappily away from my friends toward home, my departure dictated by the setting sun. To my mother’s chagrin, I slowly learned to break the rules: turn my phone back on later in the night, stop turning it off altogether, do homework after dinner, and eventually go back out to my friends. The sabbath went from a reflexive muscle, something I did obediently, to something I learned to resent and reject. The practice-turned-duty held little meaning for me, I thought.

Last summer, for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, I returned to College Hill, to the company of more than my family or a pod of four people. There was so much bursting joy in those months of post-vaccine life, in the abundance of a Rhode Island summer, of new and returned friendship. To dance beside a stranger in a basement was a revelation. More radical, though, was Shabbat.

Where to begin? In the dorm kitchen, bumping elbows for countertop space, improvising for pot lids. In the eggplant oozing with cheese, fresh out of the oven, the herbs pulled straight from the ground. In the family-style dishes being passed from hand to hand, crowding tables pushed together in a common room. In the buoyancy of a room filled with conversation, in the freedom of sharing a meal with fifteen new people. In the sharing of a tradition I realized I had learned not only to accept, but to love. 

I quieted the room and, together with another Jewish friend, explained to those splitting chairs and eagerly ripping pieces of Challah (Jewish and not, practicing and not) the meaning of Shabbat. I talked about deliberate, communal rest, the importance of the pause. I recited prayers (eager to perform) through my lips and those of my ancestors, of my community. I rested my head on the shoulder of someone whose friendship was new and delightful, a little wine drunk, and told them I was happier than I had been in months, maybe years. I can barely explain that feeling: to be filled with so much of such a small joy that it almost hurts your chest. To be so full with such good food, fuller because you made it yourself. To sit for hours in the same chair, rooted in stillness. 

Another Friday that summer, on a darkened living room floor with a plate full of potluck dinner, I found myself in tears as my body remembered the words of a Hebrew song I didn’t know I knew. To sing in community: another small joy. My voice rising into unexpected, unintentional harmony, braiding together with others like challah strands, weaving and spiraling in the air like the crows.

 Growing up in organized religion, for me, has been a practice of curation: sifting through the practices and prayers and laws of Judaism embedded in my childhood to pull out what still feeds me. The teenage slate-clearing of tradition made room for the careful, meditative reentry of intentional spirituality to my life. In this space, and the space of a life I am starting to carve out for myself, I am building a practice all my own. In the absence of a certainty about faith or divinity, I come back to community, to ritual, to the lessons Judaism has for us that transcend God. I return to the sensorially-rooted practices I once rejected, reveling perhaps even just in the memory of my childhood rooted in them. 

As the leaves shake off branches to make way for the sky and the crows circling in it, so too did my shaking off of practice allow meaning to return. 

Early pandemic discourse was rife with ideas of a collective break, full of instructions to use quarantine as rest from the churning cycles of 21st century life. We are all familiar by now: images of wild animals returning to the city abounded alongside people documenting their bread baking journeys. In that moment, perhaps we all understood a little more of the importance of what Shabbat attempts to impart. Though I by no means wish to return to those early months, I am grateful for whatever meaning I can pull from them. In Shabbat, this rest is preserved, healthy this time: rest in moderation.

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The Torah has a law, shmita (שמיטה), translated as the Sabbath Year or the Sabbath of the Land but also literally as release. During shmita, fields must be left to lay fallow: no sowing, no plowing, no growing, no harvesting. If you observe shmita, if you let your fields rest, you will be rewarded with a bountiful harvest. Just like the Sabbath, on the seventh day of the week, every seventh year is a shmita: cycles of rest are baked into Jewish practice. This Jewish year, 5782, which begun in September 2021, is a shmita year.

Like many Jewish laws, the practice of shmita is practical before it is spiritual. The reward of shmita—a bountiful harvest—comes not from God but rather the soil, which when allowed to rest can replenish its nutrients and give forth thriving crops for years to come. Overworked earth is not fruitful earth. Over time, the soil is degraded, sluiced off the fields into waterways, made sterile. Our country’s agricultural system has a lesson to learn here: an obsession with productivity now decreases long-term sustainability. 

One need not reach far for the agricultural metaphor here. Growth comes from rest, so says this law, so says the land. Wintering. This day, a Friday at the last gasping days of the winter of the shmita year of 5782, speaks only of rest and dormancy.

I think I have much to learn from the winter, from Shabbat, from shmita. The pause does not come easily to me in this life that runs so fast. When I returned to school after a year on leave, even while reveling in the Sabbath, I ignored my need to rest. I threw myself back in. I pushed myself to move on from heartache too fast, into newness too soon. If you will forgive my metaphor, I overworked myself. Slowly, slowly, I allowed myself grace for slowness. When I realized this year was a shmita year, it came as a relief. Of course. This was a year meant for rest: the mistake I made was in attempting to grow when it was meant to be a time of gathering underground. 

On this day of 5782, I look forward to the growth close at hand, but for now I will lie fallow. Think of it not as a stagnation but a release: from expectations, from speed, from ceaselessness. Another lesson from the crows: there can be slowness in movement and movement in slowness. 

I say this easily, here, but rest is not something that comes naturally to me. The pause of Shabbat is something I rejected for years, something I am still working to keep in this life that runs so fast. I am learning to love winter as I am learning to love Shabbat as I am learning to allow myself this year of quiescence.