The Cold
How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,
my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go
separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you
perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping
–to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.
And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.
~Wendell Berry
Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
“Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
For too much of my life I have focused on the future, bypassing the present. There is always a goal to achieve, a conclusion becoming commencement of the next phase, a sunset turning right around in a few hours to become sunrise.
There are precious times when the present is so overwhelming, so riveting, so tenderly full of life, I must grab hold with all my strength to try and secret it away and keep it forever. But it still slips away from me, elusive and evasive, torn to bits by the unrelenting movement of time.
Even if I was able to take a photo to lock it to a page or screen, it is not enough. No matter how I choose to preserve the canvas of the present, it is passed, ebbing away never to return. I can only wonder at the present by focusing less on the foreshortening future.
So I write to harvest those times to make them last a little bit longer. Maybe not forever; they will be lost downstream into the ether of unread words.
Even if unread, I am learning that words, which had the power in the beginning to create life, can bring tenderness and meaning back to my life. How blessed to live the gift twice: not just in the moment itself but in writing words that preserve and treasure it all up.
Remember the goodness of God in the frost of adversity.
~Charles Spurgeon
Hard times leave us frozen solid,
completely immobilized
and too cold to touch,
yet there is hope and healing,
remembering the immensity and goodness of God.
Even when life’s chill leaves us aching,
longing for relief,
the coming thaw is real
because God is good.
Even when we’re flattened,
stepped on, broken into fragments —
the pieces left are the beginning
of who we will become,
made whole again
because God is good.
The frost lasts not forever.
The sun makes us glisten and glitter
as ice melts down to droplets.
We become the goodness of God,
His eyes and ears,
heart and soul,
hands and feet.
Even more so,
we are His tears.
It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.
I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I’m a work horse, always have been. When others are playing and partying and relaxing, I’m busy busy busy. This is not so much a moral imperative for me but a consequence of the depression era family in which how I grew up — Aesop’s fable grasshopper/ant parable personified. If I don’t keep my nose to the grindstone now, what might happen down the road, as winter comes, when there is no one else to do what needs to be done, when there is not enough of anything needed to survive? Making hay and raising tomatoes indeed. That’s only the half of it. It is fertilizing, cultivating, harvesting, storing, preserving and then starting all over again. I don’t know how else to be or how else to live. And yes, there can be a fair amount of indulgent sulking.
So, true to obsessive form, I picked a profession that encourages this kind of behavior. A sixty hour work week is typical, with responsibilities 24/7. I don’t often allow time to stalk the gaps, enjoy the view, and let life flow over me like a never ending stream. Even a theoretical “afternoon off” as I’m supposed to have built into my schedule once a week rarely materializes.
Today is my scheduled afternoon off. Unstructured, uncommitted, open time. Yikes.
I’m going to spend it rather than losing it forever. It can’t be banked, stored away, preserved for the future or otherwise saved like an ant loves to do. Once it is gone, it is gone and it will never return. It is mine to spend.
I have no idea what to do with it but I’ll figure it out.
Or simply just be.
And definitely not sulking.
… And still the syllables of water whisper:
The wheel of cloud whirs slowly: while we wait
In the dark room; and in your heart I find
One silver raindrop,—on a hawthorn leaf,—
Orion in a cobweb, and the World.
~Conrad Aiken from “Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise the Rain”
I lay silent under the comforter listening, listening to the constancy of rain. No let up, no diminishing, just all night long whispering in the dark — water falling from on high.
John Updike says: “Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”
So I feel blessed by communion with this rainy grace, lots and lots and lots of descending grace, a zillion silver drops falling together to bathe my parched and thirsty world, keep it cleansed and refreshed.
I look for –and find — the world in a raindrop.
I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
In autumns that there were
With morning mist and silver sun
And wind upon my hair
I sit beside the fire and think
Of how the world will be
When winter comes without a spring
That I shall ever see
For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green
I sit beside the fire and think
Of people long ago
And people that will see a world
That I shall never know
But all the while I sit and think
Of times there were before
I listen for returning feet
And voices at the door
— J.R.R. Tolkien
Silence and darkness grow apace, broken only by the crack of a hunter’s gun in the woods. Songbirds abandon us so gradually that, until the day when we hear no birdsong at all but the scolding of the jay, we haven’t fully realized that we are bereft — as after a death. Even the sun has gone off somewhere… Now we all come in, having put the garden to bed, and we wait for winter to pull a chilly sheet over its head.
~Jane Kenyon from “Good-by and Keep Cold”
Every day now we hear hunters firing in the woods and the wetlands around our farm, most likely aiming for the few ducks that have stayed in the marshes through the winter, or possibly a Canadian goose or a deer to bring home for the freezer. The usual day-long symphony of birdsong is replaced by shotguns popping, hawks and eagle screams and chittering, the occasional dog barking, with the bluejays and squirrels arguing over the last of the filbert nuts.
In the clear cold evenings, when coyotes aren’t howling in the moonlight, the owls hoot to each other across the fields from one patch of woods to another, their gentle resonant conversation echoing back and forth. The horses confined to their stalls in the barns snort and blow as they bury their noses in flakes of summer-bound hay.
But there is no birdsong arias, leaving me bereft of their blending musical tapestry that wake me at 4 AM in the spring. No peeper orchestra from the swamps in the evenings, rising and falling on the breeze.
It is too too quiet.
The chilly silence of the darkened days is now interrupted by all percussion, no melody at all. I listen intently for early morning and evening serenades returning.
It won’t be long.
…to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –
but who was God.
~Denise Levertov, from “Annunciation”
Today, the day celebrated in the church as Epiphany (His Glory revealed and made manifest in all lives), bookends the day Mary accepted her role as an earthly vessel to become the Mother of God.
Epiphany is our turn for this glory to be revealed in our lives; with infinite heaviness and lightness we accept our new role as weak and crumbling vessels, yet even so God is made manifest within us. It is not the easy path to accept the ultimate freedom that requires true sacrifice, just as it was not easy for Mary whose heart was pierced. She could not know what this announcement meant for her life, but yet she said yes to God.
And so, we shall say yes as well.
“Like Mary, we have no way of knowing… We can ask for courage, however, and trust that God has not led us into this new land only to abandon us there.”
~Kathleen Norris from God With Us
As light departs to let the earth be one with night
Silence deepens in the mind and thoughts grow slow;
The basket of twilight brims over with colours
Gathered from within the secret meadows of the day
And offered like blessings to the gathering Tenebrae.
~ John Donohue, from “Vespers”
Barnstorming 