It is winter, the farmer’s rest after the summerlong contest, coming as surely if he wins as if he loses. Victor perhaps only in that I’ve survived the just-past growing season, still I would prolong this moment of hesuchia, for soon enough it will be the time of shortage which a Chinese peasant calls “the months where the green and yellow do not meet”— when the stores of harvest have dwindled to dried yams and rotting carrots, or in more modern, capitalistic terms, when the bank account nears zero.

No matter how much money I earn, each year the late winter end times are lean. What seemed a surplus shrinks like a radioactive element, its half-life mere weeks as it drifts from plenty toward shortage. “Making do” becomes the theme, a seemingly nonsensical phrase that nonetheless explains the process of late-winter thrift. Shift your ideas so they fit the facts, it says, alter your definition of need so that it matches what your resources allow, for the “enough” of early winter’s full storehouse dwarfs the “enough” of late spring’s empty pantry.

But that period of diminished stores comes soon enough. Now is the time of hesuchia, a time of fullness.

Hesuchia has been translated as “rest”, as “stillness”, even, by those seeking to quiet their wives with a biblical proscription from Paul, as “silence”. It is a piece of time and a way of being that we measure not in seconds or minutes but by its intensity and character—and by its ability to exclude the after-ness and before-ness that threaten its borders. Not just winners experience it, though any who experience it feel victorious, for an assemblage that includes quitters, losers, procrastinators, revolutionaries, Zen practitioners, drug addicts, poets and painters establish their actions on a quest to either repeat or attain it in its many forms. It is a transcendence of sort, a moving-on beyond the agon into refuge. It is away, beyond, not then, not yet.

We know hesuchia as an “occasion”—a “drop of experience”, in Whitehead’s terms—a discrete moment that, while connected to other times, seems separate from them. Sometimes possessing the fragile consistency of a soap bubble, an occasion may slip flimsily into consciousness and burst just as easily from it, for it takes no more than self-awareness to break one such occasion as it creates another. Reformed marijuana users will understand this process, remembering how during their early use they might point at something as simple as a dog and laugh insanely at its every behavior, but recalling more distinctly the moment when they took the dog’s place, with their actions becoming ridiculous and their laughter transforming to fright, shame or intense paranoia. The occasion of observing became the occasion of the observed, the joy of a marijuana high never to again be the same.

Such an occasion can become so embedded and unpleasant that we seek its immediate destruction. Its surrounding walls steely and concretized, it inspires panic as we seek to break through it and into a new stage of consciousness—into, perhaps, an occasion characterized by hesuchia, one with the ability to serve as calm in the swift-running river of typical experience, a place between other places, a time between other times, one that provides a noncommittal sense of freedom even as it fosters the notion of safety.

Such is this winter.