Monday - February 09, 2009
Winter's Palette - January 2009
Winter's palette is simple. Waters rise pewter grey and white-capped. The sky is low-slung and ponderous, heavy with its burden. The ground is slushy and scarred gleaming wet-black, scraped bare over and over by the growling passage of emergency crews at work. Homes and landscape are muted to pale shades of themselves, seen through thick veils of wind-tossed snow.
During the lulls between snowstorms, the spectrum brightens. Fat round dollops of foamy white overflow along skyline and rooftop, branches and roadside. Frozen surfaces glint and fracture into rainbow shards, hard and reflective in daylight. Icicles hang like so many fangs from the house, drooling when the sun warms them, plonk-plunk. Smoke puffs out of chimneys, the sky arches blue overhead, and golden light spills through windows when purpling dusk falls. Comic snowmen tilt in awkward directions, clad in woolly fashions and vegetable expressions. Sometimes, for a few soft hours, the world runs wet and dripping, tender along its edges.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Winter's palette is simple. Waters rise pewter grey and white-capped. The sky is low-slung and ponderous, heavy with its burden. The ground is slushy and scarred gleaming wet-black, scraped bare over and over by the growling passage of emergency crews at work. Homes and landscape are muted to pale shades of themselves, seen through thick veils of wind-tossed snow.
During the lulls between snowstorms, the spectrum brightens. Fat round dollops of foamy white overflow along skyline and rooftop, branches and roadside. Frozen surfaces glint and fracture into rainbow shards, hard and reflective in daylight. Icicles hang like so many fangs from the house, drooling when the sun warms them, plonk-plunk. Smoke puffs out of chimneys, the sky arches blue overhead, and golden light spills through windows when purpling dusk falls. Comic snowmen tilt in awkward directions, clad in woolly fashions and vegetable expressions. Sometimes, for a few soft hours, the world runs wet and dripping, tender along its edges.
Some people aren't warm or feeling safe. They're living quite close to the edge. All of us, to a smaller extent, feel this danger.
Ice snatches away the footing below, making every step a thought-filled one...you watch where you're walking, you fling your arms wide for balance or hold tight to whatever support is nearby, and pray you'll make it to your destination. If you're on snowboards, sleds, or skis, perhaps it's a plummeting belly-emptying shout of glea. For pedestrians, and even drivers, it's a skittish journey nowadays. As often as possible, you stay safely in one place, and don't risk traveling.
Hard to believe that underneath it all, bulbs planted last year await their time. Roots dig deep and life runs slow, but it's there.
January also brought empty pantries, blue-tipped fingers, closed doors, foreclosures, layoffs, and renewed violence in uneasy parts of the world. We find that some of our friends and loved ones remain in harm's way. Yet the first month of the year also gave us the first days of a new year and a second chance. A change of leadership for the nation. A swell of hope, unity and renewed purpose.
So often, the world around us feels like a metaphor for what's going on inside each one of our hearts. Or in our communities or nations. Yes, it's a time of uncertainty. Disbelief. Sorrow. Perhaps even stark fear or blazing anger. How could this happen? What is coming? History doesn't seem to have a recipe for this changing, shifting time. Our personal experiences haven't prepared us for what we must do here. If indeed, we can do anything at all.
Yet it's a season of tremulous hope. Strength. Courage. Conviction and commitment. Perhaps we can cope. Survive. Perhaps we can even do more that just get by. Maybe we can look forward and rebuild.
Our family lived through times when all we could do was survive. Vigil. Believe. We counted breaths, units of blood and platelets, doses of medication, degrees of fever, vitals-checks with nurses, consultations with specialists. Everything else was out of our hands, including the ability to make to-do lists or plans or dream bigger dreams.
That time is past. It came at great price...Jessie's passage. But we're here.
Sometimes, we burrow deep in woolen layers, lulled by hot steaming mugs and tongues of flames and throbbing bass music and blurred printed words on pale pages, as we wait out the hardest, darkest times. Other days, we fling ourselves heedlessly out the door into the elements, in need of every sting and lick of cold, so we know...we can feel something at all. Often, we're just counting steps, arms out-flung, struggling for momentum and balance, all at the same time.
It's easy to sink down into the folds and layers of winter. To be buried and slumberous and slow. And that's okay. It's necessary and healing. It's the somnolent, restorative part of winter.
But there's this other part. The part you can grab onto sometimes. For instance, memory: a day on the winter-clad mountains with Sarah and Jessie, in the moment your red sled plummets down a packed snow path, rushes around the dark jagged thrust of an exposed rock outcropping, and lifts into the snapping blue-white air. Purple puffy mittens fly, tasseled hats cartwheel through the air. Your stomach lands seconds behind your gravity-weighted body, and your hipbones rattle with impact. Skidmarks trace your route.
In the ponderous arc of your rising and falling, what sound escapes from the deepest core of you? Peals of laughter and joy. "Woo-hooo! Again! Let's do it again!"
Sometimes, you have to remind yourself of those sensations, when you cannot quite recreate them. Each of us must have them, stored like small energy cells in our padded winter bodies, waiting to be burned when the darkest, coldest times set in. When laughter and hope don't seem within reach. Just know, they're inside. Those high-flying, earth-defying, seize-the-moment moments. Puffs of breath-knocked-out hope. Part of each of us. Small burning gifts: little suns. Part of our wintertime possibility and power.