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.
Some fell on rock atop a wilted leaf surrounded by a sweep of fallen needles the color of rust in a January rain that puddled beneath them. Nevertheless, they sprouted and put forth leaves, the world wanting a bit more color that deep gray day.
I walk the edge of the wetlands taking in its wintry hues, its silence, when a patch of grass whistles to my eyes. Bleached ribbons of it bow in great, looping curves as if a troop of wee, invisible dancers were tossing them in the air to some joyous strain just outside the my range of hearing, but rippling through me just the same.
The photo of the shoreline served as a kind of quiz, its stark simplicity and vivid near-monochrome color evoking a question from somewhere in my mind. Four weeks have passed since we began. Remember? This is your gift of lessons in winter’s palette and forms. Pause now; look back. See what you have discovered.
I’ve seen how winter’s gallery holds wondrous abstractions, their lines and hues compelling a more studied view. They call out, I see, our projections, our make-believe stories of what we could be seeing. The brain is hungry to identify this unknown thing, to name it as if that would produce a more intimate connection somehow,
I’ve seen that wonders hide in the details, surprises and gifts. I’ve noticed the sharpness of things, the crystal frost, the brittle ice along the shore that layers and grows smooth in the lake’s center and strong enough to hold a large flock of geese settled there as the ice were grass. I’ve learned how to see the way that broader horizons give you a context for things,
How you frame things matters. You capture one measure of the song’s endless score to hold it still within time, gazing at its intricate structures, the way it rises from and gives rise to what came before, what’s coming next. You let it tell you its histories and the meaning of its part in the song,
I’ve observed the juxtaposition of winter’s colors, and always, of course, the play of the light, highlighting this, casting that into shadow in a wild and graceful dance. But this seeing is nothing I intentionally do, beyond allowing it to happen, inviting it to show me what it will. I go into it with a motto: Empty mind. Open arms. Much joy.
Look! It snowed! And there’s sky! My mind wakes in glee as I peer through the clear spaces on the north window, the colors revealing the mood of the day. Then I see the window itself, pebbled with frozen rain that must have followed the snow. Over the years, I have witnessed frost art galore, great, ephemeral masterpieces, on this glass. But never before, not once, has a scene such as this sung its welcome to the morning. I nod and raise my mug of coffee in salute: Good Day.
I reminded myself that I had survived the cold when I went out to feed the chickadees. Besides, this was the first snow of the winter, slight as it was, to hang around for a while, and the sky had patches of blue and all that rare, brilliant sunshine. I relented. And the next thing I knew, there I was, in the pines beside the lake, just passing the nursery and noticing how the sunlight danced on the young ones’ glossy needles. But it was the dazzling light itself that drew me. “Come,” it invited. “Look from here.” I followed the tall shadows it cast on the ground, the snowy spaces between them dazzling in the light, and every inch of the place clear as the crisp air, and singing “Hallelujah!”
I came across a beautiful quote today, from a brilliant Italian architect, engineer and archeologist who lived in the late 1400’s. His name was Fra Giovanni Giocondo, and his counsel about living in happiness rolls across six centuries to us today.
“I am your friend,” he said, “and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got. But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.”
Think about that. “No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today.” There is no other life but the one unfolding around us right now. And this life, this moment–if we look into it deeply enough, if we are awake and fully present within it, and sense how far it extends–holds everything: All beauty; all grace; all goodness; all truth. Right here, right now, perfection abounds.
“No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant.” All that hides peace is our warring against what is, our wanting it to be otherwise. The moment we exchange our warring and wanting for acceptance, peace descends.
The faults we perceive, in ourselves, in each other, in the world, truly are but shadows. And it is we ourselves who cast them, with our storyboard judgments and beliefs. But once we learn to set aside our criticism and our theories about how things ought to be, and to open our hearts instead, seeing what is before us with clarity and love, the light of joy shines through.
And it’s all right there, within you, within me, within us all, for the taking. Take heaven. Take peace. Take joy.
