At cloud-height the winds are fierce. You can tell by the way the clouds sweep across the sky. But here, at the base of these broad hills, it is still. Not one brittle husk is moving.
It’s as if the earth is holding its breath, or breathing in slow, meditative rolls. If you stand here and listen with your whole body, you can feel the power–rested, awake, waiting.
Here, only earth, only sky. And between them, all that is needed to sustain their every child. All of them. And I get to stand here, a guest at the wedding, tears at the beauty of it welling in my eyes.
An encore snow powdered down overnight, two inches of it. Just right. And the blue sky and sunshine irresistibly lured me to come play. Then it happened. That seldom-in-a-lifetime and only if you’re very lucky event. I caught them. The trees. Just finishing a twirl. You know that moment when a dance ends and the last note has just faded into silence? That’s how it was. I could almost hear them settling the way they do after a gust of wind has passed through. And I swear their branches were slightly bobbing, even though the air was perfectly still now, holding nothing but exuberance, left over, I am sure, from the dance.
Here’s what I wrote in my journal, a little piece of satire for my own entertainment:
12:30 Well, maybe. It’s clock-change day.
We’re, um, saving daylight now. I never quite understood how that works. I picture somebody in a lab coat, all expert-looking, trying to stuff it into a quart-sized canning jar. But it’s light, you know, and it keeps spilling out all over.
Anyway, everybody had to “spring forward,” and it’s now an hour later than it was yesterday at this time. So I guess whoever is in charge of this clocks thing must have figured out a way to tuck that missing hour of light safely away somewhere for us all. We’ll adjust. It’s the price we have to pay, right? You never know when we might need it after all.
And regardless of the nuisance, isn’t it amazing that we can actually save daylight now?
I was visiting with a circle of close friends and Patricia said something about feeling contentment. “Oh!” I exclaimed, “That’s my very favorite positive emotion. If I had to pick just one, contentment would be it.”
Patricia said how she much preferred it to happiness or joy, which, to her, sounded airy and frivolous somehow, superficial. She shimmied her upraised hands in the air and we laughed.
I told her I understood exactly what she meant. It’s hard to take joy or happiness seriously; they’re so lightly portrayed. But contentment, yeah, you can settle right in with that. Let it ooze up all around you, all peaceful and warm.
I thought about our conversation later and about the book Authentic Happiness that was popularized when the study of positive psychology came into vogue. Its purpose was to differentiate the happiness and joy that we associate with giddiness and delight from the soul-deep happiness that dwells in the core of our being.
Why I hold contentment as my favorite emotion is that it’s filled with such a profound acceptance, even welcoming, of everything that floats through our awareness. Get there, and you’ll know the taste of true joy. The deeper you go, the more beautiful it becomes.
I thought about this as I ventured out into the cold, windy morning to feed the birds and get a couple photos. I must admit it wasn’t something I was happy about doing. I’ve been smitten with a serious case of spring fever and I am more than ready to see winter go. But the poor birds needed breakfast, given the two inches of fresh snow, and I needed photos.
I tell the tale of my venture into the cold and the lessons that it brought me in the piece I wrote after I came in and got warm. It’s called The Snow Today. It has pictures, too.
It’s actually the “Day 72” piece for my 100-Day Challenge to add to my blog every day. Remember? I’ll reach the three-quarter mark this week and I think I’m starting to hit my stride. I like how it’s evolving. I like what I’m learning as I go along, and I’m having a blast. This week, one of my faithful readers said the countdown was making her a bit sad. She didn’t want to see it end. I told her nobody said I had to quit at 100. I’m just starting to have fun!
With all the turmoil and suffering in this old world, it’s wise to have an hour or so set aside every day to do something that will hold your attention, let you develop a skill, put you in the flow state for a bit. It helps keep you sane. It places you into a different parcel of reality for a while. It’s kind of like a fine, mental vacation. At least that’s how my daily challenge feels to me, for what it’s worth. I thought you might enjoy an update.
Whatever works. That’s my motto. Sometimes this works; sometimes that. Sometimes you get to do some inventing. The key, though, is to keep moving toward that state of contentment, that utterly full and completely easy acceptance of everything, just as it is. Because that’s just a beautiful place to be.
I suppose I’d better take some pictures. It could be the last snow of the year. Or for ever, for that matter. Which reminds me of the advice of a poet (whose name, I’m sorry, I do not recall) that went something like this:
See everything as if for the first time, or for the last.
Remembering that woke me up. See? Right here! It could be the last time! Look how the scene, as always, is perfect.
Seeing throws me right into things, sharpens the real, brings it all into focus. Right here. Right now.
But the tricky thing I’ve noticed about the present is that it holds the past as well, and dreams and wishes for the future, and you embroider them with colored threads and you get lost in the picture and have to wake up all over again.
But sometimes the beauty of it, when you do truly see, is so poignant that it makes you make up songs of celebration. You can’t help it. It‘s love at first sight when you first see.
Then there are the ordinary things -the wallpaper, the shoe – suddenly transformed into treasures, with their imprints of jeweled hours and dear faces, seen as if you would never see them ever again.
Snow’s coming tonight. They say 3-5 inches. Some of me wants to scream. I just got dug out. And then there’s that kid inside me, jumping and clapping in exuberant delight, all exited, can’t wait. I scowl at her.
But I get over it right away. What will be, will be And besides, it’s balmy enough for my spring jacket, a fine time for a walk through the woods. While I can. Just in case. Well, and just because it’s there, calling me. I pull on my boots.
I head toward the path through the pines. The vinca is popping up through the leaves. And from the look of things, the squirrels have eaten well. The cool air is moist and delicious, subtly scented. I come to the edge of the lower pond.
Everything seems poised, as if waiting for a signal. “Almost”, I say, as I round the pond’s edge. “Almost.” “First, one more good snow.” The woods doesn’t care. I smile, tasting the coming spring, alert for its signs. But first, one more lovely snow.
The Path Through The PinesVinca WakingThe Remains of the FeastThe Lower Pond at Winter’s End
You could pass right by here and not notice. A glance tells you there’s nothing going on, same old bare trees, no color, didn’t see a living thing. But stand here for a minute.
Don’t pay those sycamores any mind. They bring up the train on spring’s dance. Look over there, across that little pond, against the dark pines. The pink haze. See it?
Look! A whole sweep of pink is everywhere. The colors never look like this any other time of year. Soon, frogs will sing. But now. this overture of waking hues, so pristine, and ringing.
Ghostlike cattails line the lake edge, standing straight and tall as an old guard of soldiers, offering a salute in honor of spring. Their velvety brown pods spill their stuffing onto the ice-capped lake, into the pool of melted water at the field’s edge. Their once-sleek leaves are brittle now and broken, but still they stand, proud to have endured the onslaughts of winter, to be standing in the coming spring’s sun. Now and then red winged blackbirds, just arrived from the south, perch atop them, sounding a salutation, and the cattails hold beneath their weight and are glad.
Overnight, the maple’s red buds burst, freeing their tiny leaves to reach for the sky. They etch a scarlet lace against the deep blue where days ago, there were but bare twigs.
From one of the high branches, a call sounded forth, clear and high, a single note followed by a pause and then repeated. From across the way an answer came,
filling the pauses, and waiting for a reply. Back and forth the two birds called to one another, as if their sole mission was to mark the opening of the buds,
On my window the worlds inside the raindrops are upside-down, with the sky at the bottom and the earth on top. What if you were a bird flying across that upside-down sky? Would you be trapped inside the drop’s edges? Would you guess that a hundred other worlds, much like yours, with birds much like you, were gliding down a transparent surface beside you? Would you feel the slide and make up myths about what it means?
I have no answers. I go outside where up is still the direction of the sky. But then I come to the puddles at the side of the road where trees, of all things, are upside down, too, or, like the mother spruce, stretched on her back in the water, clay smeared across her and a bed of pebbles at her side as if it were all some surrealist work of art.
Even if you walk to a puddle’s far side so that the trees look upright, they are not solid, as they seem to be in the world I (laughingly) call real, and stones hang above them in their watery sky.
Nevertheless, the scene has a kind of beauty to it.
Tomorrow I will wake to sunshine and this will all be gone, these dreams I dreamed on this rainy winter day. “But don’t worry,” I say to them, wrapping them in soft sheets of memory. “I will remember you. I will remember.”
