Sonja is hunting for dog bane. She prizes it for its fibers, and tells me never to feed it to dogs. She keeps her eye out for plants that might yield dyes for the wool she will spin into soft yarns. We laugh at the burrs that stick to our clothes. She shows me how she felts the holes that happen when her scarf gets snagged. She calls the patches polka dots. The sun and blue sky disappear as we eat sandwiches of peanut butter and raw honey. We don’t notice. We have cocoa and raspberries and miles to explore, and it’s close enough to perfect for both of us right now. As we push through the brush, the creek sings happy January songs, and I drink in the winter colors, feeling lucky and blessed.
I hope that sometime you stop what you’re doing and really look at a tree, knowing, once again, that it’s alive, as much as you are, maybe more, and knowing that, not because someone told you, but because when you stopped to look, you saw how gloriously it danced for the morning.
It was the red of the berries that stopped me. Not a minute ago I was ankle deep in the snow that draped every inch of the land. From the edge of the lake, the world looked as if it had been drawn in charcoal on fine paper. Now this! A collage of leathery leaf and snow crystal, delicate as breath, gold needles and jade and the lacquered red berries that, as I said, caught my eye and stopped me in my tracks. Imagine what had to happen for this scene to be. Soil, pine nut and acorn, and birds to carry them to this exact spot, not to mention the years and the rain. Everything. Everything. And now it’s all come together in one small work of art , a gift for those who can see. That’s you, I imagine. And me.
If it’s going to be winter, it may as well snow. It may as well drape the boughs with crystal and invite the children out to play. It may as well etch the branches of the woodlands and scatter powdered diamonds on the ground.
If it must be cold, it may as well grace us with love-flakes like these tumbling around us as the grand silent song shimmers Yes.
I stop in my tracks when I see them, my face breaking into a wide grin. Look how proud they are, how happy, to be adorned with garments of light as if they were a choir of some kind selected to sing for the king. Aren’t they sweet? I’ve known them since they were a third this size. And look how they’ve grown! Look how swiftly they’ve grown.
The earth in this forest asks you to walk softly letting its song rise up through your feet. Its air seeps into you and carries a scent that clarifies your mind and expands you until all your boundaries dissolve and all of this—lake, trees, snow, sky—is inside you with all of its woven, ancient stories. Now you emerge. You! In the midst of it, with stories of your own. And all the while, the whole of it is inside you, singing, revealing its unfolding joy.
I watched the snow dissolve the world’s colors. It started with the sky, inhaling its light it were a fuel of some kind. That alone was enough to cast a pallor over the land, to stop the play of its shadows. Meanwhile, the snow turned the pines a deep gray, and everything else to shades of charcoal and dull ashy white. Except for the sound of a snow plow scraping the asphalt as it descends the eastern hill, the world is silent. The birds are hidden balls of downy feathers, heads tucked into their wings. The furred things are curled in their burrows. No cars pass. No dogs bark. It’s almost as if breath itself has ceased, as if everything, for this one timeless moment, has paused and is waiting for morning.
Back when the year was first turning into 2023, I was thinking about what I might want to focus on accomplishing in the year ahead. I had a whole list of small-to-medium sized projects already jotted down, but that’s an on-going process. It’s how I get things done. I was looking for something different, like a guide word, something I could aspire to incorporating into my life or to expressing.
The idea occurred to me that in addition to writing down three things for which I’m grateful each night—something I’ve practiced for 3-4 years now—I could make a note of something I learned during the day. I didn’t decide actually to do it. It was just a thought that danced through my mind from time to time. And then, one day this week, I realized I was, in fact, learning things. So I guess the question, “What did I learn today?” adopted me, whether I adopted it or not.
I kind of like it. I like that it’s just going to hang around and wink at me from time to time.
I don’t have to make any rigid appointments, I can just respond to it as if it were an old friend who drops in for a chat from time to time. It has me on the lookout for things I’m discovering so I’ll have an answer when it asks me what’s up.
I’ve caught myself having imaginary conversations with it. It sits across the table from me sipping tea, a relaxed smile on its face, casually saying “Make any new discoveries?”
“Well, yes,” I answer. “Now that you ask, I discovered that it’s fun to notice what I’ve discovered. And on another level, it’s interesting to see how my thoughts are going in a new direction, how I’m getting little hints about a new insight that’s sliding toward me down the timestream. Oh, and I learned that I’m getting better at paying attention to my intuition, to taking action on my creative impulses.”
Did you ever do that? Take stock of what you were learning as you tumble through your days? It opens up a whole new level of self-appreciation, I tell you. It wakes you up in a whole range of ways. All you have to do is ask yourself from time to time what you’ve discovered recently, what you’re learning, what you’ve learned. Until you check it out, you have no idea! You’re marvelous in ways you completely overlook.
Smiling at you, I wish you a week of amazing discoveries.
This is the part of the season I dread, this long haul through the bleakness of it and the cold. But an impulse strikes me to walk in the woods, and to take with me a willingness to be entranced. So I go, regardless of the heavy blanket of sky. I am but a few yards down the trail when I find that I am, indeed, entranced, and wandering through a living gallery made of earth and sky, surrounded by exquisite works at every turn, mine for the seeing. Mine for the surrender of my no to my yes.
I walk past you a dozen times, at least, every day, without giving you so much as a glance. But don’t think for a minute that I do not feel your touch, hear your song. And when I do pause to look at you, directly, face to face, all I can think is how astonishing it is to live in this world alongside your grace. Every day. And walk past without so much as a nod.
