Far Away Land

or "Why I Drink"

You know, even though my hands are chapped and my cuticles are bleeding . . . even though I can't breathe when I walk and I haven't slept a whole night through . . . it's great to be here. I LOVE IT HERE. I live in a commune at the bottom of the earth where a million people whine to me every day, and I LOVE IT HERE.

Tonight, a woman with whom I wintered came into the ladies room and burst into tears. She had watched a 15 minute video put together by a departing winter-over of the auroras over the dome and over the station and over MAPO. She just burst into tears . . . and I knew. I was covered in mud mask, but hugged on her anyway. Just held her and told her I was sorry. I knew what she was crying about. It's hard to describe . . . wintering. It's the worst horror you have ever endured and the greatest joy. She was married the last time she wintered. She's not married now. In her winters (she's done more than one) she found her place and her rhythm and no doubt she too saw the Hand of God down here . . . just like me. And when you watch those auroras dance, even when it's just a movie, all that joy and pain and fun and change and DEEP UNDERSTANDING reverberates again and it is totally overwhelming.

You can look into someone's eyes and know they have wintered. And it's not the new winter-overs. They are just obnoxious and irritating. God, they drive me crazy. So self-righteous and dick-swingy. It's the folks who have wintered a while ago -- the ones who have processed -- who have absorbed what it does to you. I don't know what it is that we all know -- but we all know it. It's like we saw something we weren't supposed to see, and in seeing it, we have destroyed ourselves. Or at least the selves that came here in the beginning, and now we are a part of something deeper and longer and far more serious.

Five years after my winter, I went to a CISM class . . . Critical Incident Stress Management. It's all about trauma and stress and post traumatic stress syndrome and it was taught as if we, the students, would be counseling those who have experienced a huge traumatic event. And during that class it all came clear to me. Wintering is the Bomb. It's the Fire. It's the Mass Casualty. It's the sudden death of love. It is the complete emptying of hope and innocence and baggage. It wears you down to the very most basic you will ever be. And then it drags on and on and on and on and on and on until you yell and scream and beg for mercy. And that trauma hits in the middle of July when you still have months to go. Because it is such a long, empty time, it hollows you out completely, and makes you understand a truth bigger than everything.

And that truth is basically a deep understanding of what it means to be human. The tragedy of it. At least that's what it gave me. And in that tragedy is such a great, important weight . . . that love. that empty nothingness. that bigness. that realization that the earth floats through nothing and it doesn't matter what we do or who we are or if we live . . . because the earth will continue to float whether we are here or not.

Maybe we see eternity and finally understand that we have no part in it. It's not about us.

The Universe is about something other than us . . . something other than human existence.

We don't matter.

Not one fleck.

And when you winter, you know that . . . deep. And it makes you fill with a special kind of joy and understanding. A special kind of emptiness that will, eventually, set you free.

I know for what she was crying. I know. And I will never not know.