Hygge may be the most important word I learned this year. It means a cozy quality especially in winter. One of my favorite students taught me hygge. See, that’s the lovely thing about tutoring. I get to be a student too.
But learning isn’t what I’m here to tell you about right now.
I woke up feeling like I wanted to create a little corner of hygge in my life right now. I realized that buying books, mugs, twinkle lights, and soft blankets for my people for Christmas, I was trying to send them that cozy feeling.
I’m still not well, still in pain, but I managed to take a walk yesterday with my nephew, Nick, and Mike. To watch the two cousins walking ahead of us and talking made me happy.
It felt like a trek, getting to the river from the dog park, but I heaved and walked my pace and found a log to sit on when I needed. I was glad I didn’t fall down as I crossed the place where people had thrown sticks and logs across a muddy place. I wobbled and leaned hard on the stick Mike had given me, but I didn’t fall in
And it rained on us. When everyone else complained of the rain, I felt relief that I could be comfortable in my jacket while little droplets touched my face. The mountain was shrouded in a thin fog, as if it was only a cloud. I love that kind of weather.
The last time I walked, at Thanksgiving, an elk had died and lay open in the field. Oh, I know it’s part of the life cycle we try so hard to avoid, but it had become a feast for so many. I tried not to think about what I had in common with this elk who had surely suffered before she died.
You must be asking, how is this hygge?
I’m sorry about that. It’s not your usual view of hygge. But as I walked, I looked at the life cycle. I often revel in what grows around me, even on the other side of the life cycle. It isn’t always pretty, the way predators kill prey, the way life ends and finds a way to begin again. Why not look at what is harder to examine, the life that is propelled when a death happens? Isn’t that an important answer to find?
I left my group of lovely solicitous people to look. They weren’t going to come any closer. Death is like that sometimes, a solitary examination. I knew it could be gross. When I looked at that poor dead elk again, it had become only sinew and bones. Many animals had feasted there. Bellies had been filled. That last segment of the life cycle had connected back upon itself. Without it, without bacteria, fungus, scat, scavengers, and even predators, the cycle of life would never connect back on itself, nutrients would never make it back to the soil to grow up into trees, flowers, and grasses.
This makes me think of the yin and the yang. I’m not well-versed in the culture that created yin and yang. But this seems like a perfect parallel to yin and yang, one not possible without the other. In order to see the bucolic elk grazing in this field with buttercup blooms in the foreground, I also have to see how a death in their numbers feeds the field and the tiny creatures who live there.
This elk didn’t have a chance to feed the mushrooms. When I walked away from the group to look at it, I saw that it had so quickly become sinew and bone in the four weeks since Thanksgiving. It had been picked clean. It didn’t even smell.
I could see how her hooves connected to her delicate ankles, how each vertebrae had a great knob to protect her spine. I got to look at her teeth, these great brown and ivory jewels set along her jawline. The brown parts swirled in the ivory parts like ungainly rings of a tree, you know, the way rings grow unevenly when something disturbs its growth. I pictured her chewing.
So, I stood there looking closely at these ground-down teeth, showing the wear, the nature of their gift to this creature that had blithely used them all her life, and I saw some little bit of beauty in the gore of her skeleton. I would never have gotten to look at the miracle of an elk’s teeth up close if not for the fact of her death.
And I wondered if the Danish had an opposing word to hygge that explained what was necessary to hygge to create it. Have you ever noticed that you have to make a mess to create something new? That meal you cooked made a great load of dishes, especially when you work all the way back to the source cooking from scratch. We work so hard not to look at that other end of our lovely meals. I tried to think of the hygge that the creatures felt when they returned full to their dens from their visit to the skeleton. I thought of the way my Teddy lies on the carpet and chews on an antler that I bought for him and how I learned that mice and rodents gnaw on antlers so that there aren’t usually antlers or bones lying around. I thought of the meals I made from meat and vegetables in packages wrapped by someone else. I thought of that feeling of a full belly and lying, cozy, on my leather couch, hygge.
Hygge is not free. It comes at a price. I wish a deep hygge for you, one that comes with an understanding of its source.
Thank you for listening, jules