Taming the Ox: Buddhist Stories and Reflections on Politics, Race, Culture, and Spiritual Practice by Charles Johnson

I am determined not to miss winter this year.

I can’t speak for other regions, but in New England, winter’s contradictory nature has always struck me as a little otherworldly. It’s both sparkly and dull. It has a stale quality, sporadically interspersed with freshness. It’s both the death and rebirth of the year.

I have always thought there was great potential in the experience of winter, some kind of great insight that could give way to a new kind of transcendence. Unfortunately, I don’t know what it is, as I seem to miss it every year due to a tendency to shy away from any discomfort and indulge only in the cozier, more comforting aspects of the season. I treat uncomfortable weather as somehow wrong, like comfortable weather gone awry.

This is a privileged problem, to be sure. I am neither ill nor disabled. I live in a safe neighborhood, loosely-populated. I am not homeless. I am not trapped inside or outside. Still, I always seem to succumb to one key feature of winter: isolation.

This year, that cannot happen.

I think many people are familiar with the Zen Buddhist term wabi-sabi, which Johnson describes as “simultaneously mystical and…