How we experience winter depends -- first of all -- on where we live. Here in the upper midwest it is a low gray sky over a white landscape. When the snow began to fall on Christmas Eve, and the shapes of everything recognizable went under like a tired swimmer who stopped struggling, the snow fell inside too, transforming an interior vista that had been sharp and hard-edged into a whitened sky.

I missed that feeling of "having to go inside" when I lived in the tropics. Winter there means ten degrees cooler and a less intense sun. It doesn't encourage withdrawal into our depths like a midwest winter, letting our lives lie fallow for a season while engaging in "wu wei" -- not-doing -- instead of frenetic activity.

Cold snowy weather is a kind of relief that lets us retreat and think things over.

When the landscape remains gray and white for weeks, however, it is also like a sensory deprivation tank. I tried that too and watched with fascination after several hours as my mind generated its own brightly colored animated graphics. Against the blackness, it was easier to see what was coming from inside out. We live in a kind of equilibrium with the input from our senses, providing from within what doesn't arrive from outside. We live suspended, as Wordsworth said, between what we "half create and what perceive."

So how we experience winter depends too on what we bring to the experience.

When things get too quiet, some people twitch. A reader in Brazil, responding to my column on "presence," suggests that we are "constructing an ADD (attention deficit disorder) society" with too much stimulation and an inability to pay attention. Channel surfing on cable television, telephoning from cars. or networking through multiple windows, we do too many things at once. But some people -- the twitterpated, as my step-son called his sometimes addled younger brother -- feel right at home in that. And who's to say they're bad or wrong?

The world can be understood as a polarity of twitchers and contemplative thinkers. That dichotomy is an oversimplification, of course, as are all divisions of the world into matched pairs.

It's easier to make distinctions at the edges of the bell curve than in the murky middle where most of us live.

What we now label ADD, a psychological disorder, is an inability to attend to one thing very long. The psyche switches channels constantly. From a broader perspective, however, perhaps we ought to be grateful for twitchers and ask what value they bring to the species.

In unpredictable or unstable environments, a twitcher at the point of patrol will outshoot a dreamy contemplative any day. That advantage probably helped us survive. In the digital world as in our cave days, a twitcher at the trigger scores more points.

A doctor who was manic-depressive wrote a book asserting that a condition present in 4% of the population has obvious survival value. She contended that many past geniuses were manic-depressive, not coincidentally. It's impossible to psychoanalyze the pages of a biography, so we'll never know, but it's worth considering. Psychologists are diagnosing more and more people as ADD. Maybe transitional families and virtual organizations reward those who don't know how to sit still. Maybe it's the "stables," who find change difficult, that are having the toughest time.

Our cultures seem to invent the antidotes we need to external conditions. In anxious times, spirituality is defined as calming or quieting our noisy minds. In the seventies, on the other hand, when people were dispersed far and wide and needed to invent "instant community," the human potential movement generated the intensive encounters we needed. The encounter may have been a hothouse flower, but hey, in a world of genetic engineering, all human beings will be hot house flowers and the question becomes: what kinds of flowers do we want to grow?

Our spiritual traditions provide, not so much answers, as templates for processes that generate answers. The digital world is a good place to look for that to happen. But the symbols of our diverse traditions must be translated into interactive experiences that speak to our real lives.

A weekend intensive I developed in the "old days" translated the six seasons of the traditional church year into experiential processes that enable people to internalize and understand the recursive stages of spiritual growth. The church calendar is a mnemonic device, letting us remember the paradigm that carries us like a rising spiral through our lives. The first season, Advent, for example, is a time of ripening prior to the arrival of unexpected, often unthinkable truths. But we have to know how those ritualized seasons correspond to our inner seasons.

Good preaching is like a Tarot card reading. Liturgical churches have calendars that turn the wheel of lessons to be read on a regular basis. Those lessons are archetypal images of healing, deliverance and transformation that it is the task of the speaker to interpret in terms of the experience of the community. It's like shuffling a Tarot deck, which also consists of such symbols, then "reading the psychic space" of the community as reflected in the depths of those images.

Communicating in cyberspace feels as much like speaking as writing. We can feel the tidal energies of real people flow in and out of our virtual lives. As advertisements ironically describe telephone calls, we "reach out and touch someone," using a simulation to encounter a real Other. Our digital symbols mediate real intimacy and real community.

All human experience is mediated through a matrix of symbols and myth. That shared network glows like images on our monitors, a web of sustaining grace, veined with light. We are held in tension, suspended momentarily between the light of the snow and the light of the low clouds, and only when the moment has passed and we exhale again do we notice that we had been holding our breath.

January 17 1998