I awoke this morning to behold a frost covered lawn. Soon I expect to wake to find a snow-covered lawn. This is Minnesota after all and the winter snow queen will arrive sooner or later. Meanwhile the
Winter Hours
march on minute by minute, day by day. The trees sleep and wait for spring, and many plants and animals also take a long winter sleep. Still, I found beauty in the frosty scenes I beheld this morning and I am sure I will find beauty when snow blankets the land.
For me winter is often a time of hunkering down, slowing down, and going inward. But so far, this winter, my days and hours have been filled with activity.
ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) of leaf in frosty grass
This past week, with a nice holiday lull I’ve been able to slow down. I’ve needed this quiet time to take in the loss of my beloved pet Gracie. Everywhere I look I stumble over happy memories of her. She was such a significant presence in all parts of my days. I miss her deeply and at the same time I am so grateful that she was a part of my life for so long. She was a good soul.
‘Put yourself in the way of grace,’ says a friend of ours, who is a monk, and a bishop; and he smiles his floating and shining smile.
And truly, can there be a subject of more interest to each of us than whether or not grace exists, and the soul? And, consequent upon the existence of the soul, a whole landscape of incorruptible forces, perhaps even a source, an almost palpably suggested second universe? A world that is incomprehensible through reason?
To believe in the soul—to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view—imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world!
How easily I travel, about halfway, through such a scenario. I believe in the soul—in mine, and yours, and the blue-jay’s, and the pilot whale’s. I believe each goldfinch flying away over the coarse ragweed has a soul, and the ragweed too, plant by plant, and the tiny stones in the earth below, and the grains of earth as well. Not romantically do I believe this, nor poetically, nor emotionally, nor metaphorically except as all reality is metaphor, but steadily, lumpishly, and absolutely.
The wild waste spaces of the sea, and the pale dunes with one hawk hanging in the wind, they are for me the formal spaces that, in a liturgy, are taken up by prayer, song, sermon, silence, homily, scripture, the architecture of the church itself.
And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.― Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
I hope that you find time to slow down and go inward during these winter days. We all need time to recharge and rejuvenate.
May you walk in beauty.
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