It was 14° when I left the house for my predawn walk this morning, though dressed in many layers, I was sufficiently warm. When I arrived at the wildlife area, I was given the honor of being the first human to step upon freshly fallen snow. Why that thrills me so, I don't know, but it does. I only wish there'd been a way to not sully the whiteness with my own footprints.
I set off on the wilder path of the lake's south side where woods and field were deep in slumber. Summer foliage was mere memory now, with the essence of every tree and shrub drawn down to root, still and at rest. The only sound I heard, but for my own footfalls, was the geese on the lake below waking with their usual brazen, honking racket.
This winter, more than any other, I hope to meet the season more as tree than goose. As I age, I find myself moving into a quieter time of reflection, drawing into root after a lifetime of activity...some of it, sadly enough, of the brazen, honking-racket variety. I long for stillness, and I recognize winter as an ally in this desire.
I recently discovered another companion. With my last library book finished and a new one not yet delivered through interlibrary loan, I was browsing my husband's bookshelves for something to read. I found Rick Bass's 1991 offering, Winter: Notes from Montana. The cover art was from a painting by landscape artist Russell Chatham, who spent most of his career painting the beauty of his adopted Montana. It is a scene reminiscent of my morning walk, trees dusted with and fields blanketed by snow.
That image was all I needed. It is a slight book, as spare as the season itself. After savoring it once on my own, I shared it aloud with my husband who, though he'd likely been captivated by the cover himself when he got it for pennies at a garage sale, had never read it.
In an ode to winter's special light, Bass writes of afternoons when "the light turns so strange...and still, that it's like a tintype—as if it's trying to hold that angle of light for as long as it can, for us to look at the fields and woods and meadows in that sharp light one last time before (it falls) away." Likewise, he is mesmerized by snow. "I watch individual flakes; I peer up through the snow and see the blank infinity from which it comes; I listen to the special silence it creates. Anything I am guilty of is forgiven when the snow falls." Southern born and raised, Bass writes "I'll never get used to snow, how slowly it comes down, how the world seems to slow down, how time slows, how age and sin and everything is buried."
I have only the usual amount of sin to bury, and there is nothing that will hide my age, should I seek such a thing. But I do want to model myself on snow's slow fall. I want to be moved by late afternoon light and winter's special silence. I want to peer up into blank infinity.
Winter is a season I have often dreaded and longed for in equal measure. Cold and darkness are not always pleasant. I can, though, always add more layers, and I can choose to identify darkness as delight, Yin's hushed answer to Yang's expansive energy.
We do not need to fear the season's darkness. As Valerie Kaur wrote in a much different and immensely worthy context (see link below), we can see winter's longer nights not as "the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb." That feels apt, for no matter who we are, something yearns to be birthed through us, something unique to us and within our very personal lives. And that something has already begun to grow deep inside. It is time now for gestation. Nature knows it...and we know it too. It is time for the repose that is counterpoint to all the hubbub that has consumed us.
As I come to these final paragraphs, night has fallen. I lower myself onto my cushion and see through the window before me that the skies have finally cleared, many hours after the weather prophets predicted. The moon, big and beautiful, is too high in the sky for me to see, but oh, how I see its light! It shines on the snowy porch roof below, causing the ice crystals embedded there to sparkle like jewels. I raise my eyes to find something even more exquisite, the nearby mountain peak glowing a vivid white as though lit from within, an inner light reflecting the larger one.
This becomes my meditation, my own inner and very individual light reflecting a larger Light. No effort is required, no concentration, no work. This meditation is elicited by the quiet of the night, the beauty of the snow, the darkness of this womb.
Yes, winter is a time to be still. Winter elicits stillness just by being itself. We need only allow it.
May the peace of the season be yours.
Leia
You can find Valerie Kaur's writing by clicking here. It is definitely worth a read, though like I said, it comes to us in a very different context~~the night after the 2016 Presidential election.
