My Winter Acedia Medicine Cabinet 💊
This is the most challenging winter I've had in years. Here is my medicine.
Welcome to Secret Letters, a paid subscriber perk of Letters from the Homestead. These monthly letters are exactly what you think: secret dispatches that feel a little too vulnerable to put in a free newsletter.
Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting my work.
The winter is long, but Babooshka is strong.
If I were a woman of great means, I’d spend my winters down south, preferably in a coastal city like Savannah. I would pretend that winter doesn’t exist and only return north at the end of Lent. I’d go south when Christ was born and return when he was in the grave.
That would be the dream.
I find the word “acedia” to be the most helpful name for my personal winter blues. Acedia is the word the desert mothers and fathers used to describe the existential despair of the daily noon-day demon— that feeling of listlessness that comes with wondering if it’s all worth it. In later iterations of Christian tradition, acedia was replaced with “sloth” in the list of seven great sins, though sloth isn’t quite what it feels like. In my play Romanov Family Yard Sale, I used the Russian word “toska” to describe the feeling, one where you have no energy for living and no energy for dying.
