This week WTaB gets artsy with our first ever Vimeo video.
We’re bringing you a short poem about autumn in Montreal and its dreamy relation to the life cycle, “Dozing Into Hibernation,” which we played over some key footage and sound we got while we were in Montreal.

This is how the Poem reads:

Dozing Into Hibernation

Oh Blessed sunshine

A last glow

Storm’s a comin’
This we all know,
The birds above,
And us below.

The summer’s laughs a distant dream,
We harvest the last of what had been sowed.
The rumours now all speak of snow

The autumn breeze our last full breath,
In the autumn leaves life battles death.
Back to the earth each one will float.

Eternal sleep.

Winter’s deep doze.

But it’s more fun if you listen to it over a really great “Explosions in the Sky” soundtrack.

It’s an ode to the 10 years I spent in Montreal where each year the passing of the seasons came with significant emotional chaos, the hardest being the transition from fall to winter; the dreading of the seemingly endless cold and darkness taking its yearly toll.

This poem was my attempt to turn what had been torture for so many years into something less painful, even maybe joyful. In fact it isn’t the death we fear as much as the suffering, and yet the amount we suffer is very often under our control.

Surviving Winter

After 3 years recovering in an endless summer, it was time for us to dip into cold again, and this time I’m trying to right my previous wrongs. With respect to cold that means learning to enjoy it, or at least not despise it.

It means looking at the cold in a whole new light.

It means learning to control the knee-jerk reaction of hunching the shoulders and taking shallow breaths, neither of which make you physically warmer and are just emotional band aids, emotional band-aids that cause long-term physical pain and chronic fatigue.

It means finding fun activities to do in the cold, not just bearing with it while commuting from point A to point B.

It means learning how to properly dress for cold and understanding layering.

Most of all though, it means getting back south before the cold looses its novelty ;)

While we ventured further into winter, this year we’re cheating the full experience and are already back into moderate West-Coast Vancouver weather. We did get a bit of snow and some freezing temperatures in the rockies and you’ll hear all about that soon.

The real test is going to come next week when we try surfing the very cold pacific waters of Tofino.

How do you deal with cold?

Keep posted, and as always, thanks for reading.