"Winter" Blues

Here in Bahia, the sun is everything—it is the dance, the movement, the energy of this place. When the sun breaks through the clouds, the city warms like a prairie ant hill. Our legs and arms creak from winter entropy. Our heads start to swivel from side to side as we break listless into the outer-world. Without the sun this city is dead.

Two weeks now. Two solid weeks of rain and much more than usual. Here in the northeast, floods have killed at least 32 people and left more than 200,000 homeless. In Salvador, the waters rose unexpectedly flooding whole neighborhoods and burying people in their cars. With many left isolated in their homes, robberies and lootings have increased dramatically. As usual, it is the poor who suffer as the city drowns in its own filth.

For me, the sun is everything. Growing up in Michigan, life can be defined by one long series of depression, by seasonal affective disorder, constant cloud coverage, and the “winter blues”. I have always wondered if climate can affect a country’s cosmology—if our religious outlook is somehow linked to our mood, or how much sun we take in. Case in point, Norse mythology vs. Greek mythology, the former being a dark story of predestined death, of a three year winter and final battle on the Vigrid Plain, of Ragnarok, the end of the world. The Greeks myths, while dramatic and very human in their tone, somehow feel less heavy, like the author was comforted by the fact that he could take a break, set down his pen, and go play outside.

Brazil, without the sun, is a hard place to be. The waters of the South Atlantic are brown and discolored. Trash lies on the street, miserable, uncollected, and the place feels worn out and sad. It is Michigan without the comforts, and not where I want to be. Guess I’m lucky to be leaving this month, to escape this “winter” for an American summer, and to balance my cosmology, mythology, and personal views once again.