January light

At the cabin, shadows are getting long at 4:00 on this January afternoon.  We walk with the dog towards the large flat rock that is a favorite. 

Here we can stand on a broad, red granite slab edged with lichen, and look west towards a distant mountain range that can be seen through a V in the canyon.  We watch the sun scale slowly down into the trees, the glare splayed like sharp spokes of light through the broad branches of Ponderosa. 

I think of Madeleine L’Engle and her star-gazing rock.  There, secrets of the cosmos poke into everyday life, as if the rock were centered under a hole in the rachia, the great solid, perforated dome that formed the primeval sky of Genesis.  Strange truth drips on the rock like rain.

Each year I wonder if I will survive winter, with its frugal light and dust-brown horizon.  I grieve the hibernation of photosynthesis, the absence of green foliage that feathers the landscape and softens harsh corners, green that feeds the world.  I have tried to train myself to the practice of winter, to embrace the bare and the cold, to find beauty in graceful skeletons of aspens and the changeable contours of ice.  It feels like Lent without sweets, or music. 

This January has been better than most.  The several warm days, rare with cordial temperatures, have melted the snow drifts and lure us outside.  Returning from the broad watching-rock, we hike in sneakers rather than boots, without jackets.  Piles of boulders and fallen soldiers of dead trees darken as the day’s light retreats.  Our jagged shadows as we walk eastward are three times our height.  There is a sense we can never live up to them. 

On my left, the grass is illumined in a slice of light.  The waning light catches wheaten stalks, all the way to the base, and highlights every reedy strand.  Grass seeds and panicles glow at the tops of their stalks, each feathery shape picked out clearly like a nimbus or corona.  I turn to look west, and see a field of grasses detailed in their moment of shining, like a delicate blond beard against the rocks.  

What has always been dismissed as “just grass,” a homogeneous green that tickles at knee-level, now becomes a display of diversity.  The grass is not one, but many.  I snap off representative heads of grasses that are curled like the dense tail of a Husky, or sturdy and clutched like grain, or lacy and spread with tiny dill-like seeds. 

Ann Zwinger’s sketches tell us we have seen bluegrass, smooth brome, pine dropseed, and slender wheat-grass.   They have escaped the usual crush of snow.  

 

In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner thing happens, the resurge of nature.   - Edna O’Brien

Peace

When I was a girl, perhaps 7 or 8, my mother set up the Christmas tree in early December, but said she’d place no presents under the tree until Christmas Eve.  For this I blamed my brother, who would unwrap presents to peek and then rewrap them, thinking no one would notice. 

Each night my parents turned on the tree lights, and I spent an entire evening staring at them. I laid down on the floor on my back, scooting carefully under the tree like a present.  I looked up through artificial pine boughs at sparkling lights, the trunk of the tree stretching high, pulled like taffy through the roof of our house to the stars.

Quieted by the twinkling—perhaps I was nearly asleep–I hummed songs from Sunday School. “Sleep in heavenly peace,” I crooned, “Sleep in heavenly peace.” 

I remember a deep, abiding calm settling within, as if pressed down by tree branches.  I could rest in that amiable peace.  It felt like summertime at the swimming pool, when I held my breath under water and drifted gently down to the pool floor, suspended and warm and still. 

Under a tree without gifts, I had found the core of Christmas.  I could recognize that grace again—in a sanctuary’s hush before singing carols with the children’s choir, in the gentle department-store mystery of my mother’s nativity set, in the luminescent cloudcover as we drove to our mountain cabin one Christmas Eve, in holly-wrapped iron sconces in a Philadelphia church, in glittering stars of Jerusalem’s night sky on a crisp winter night.  

These moments hinted at the edge of a comprehensive peace, of a magnitude yet to be known, a shalom promising restoration and mercy and justice and joy. 

It took years to realize that connecting with this calm is what I most want for Christmas. If I rush through the season, distracted by details, I leave no room for wonder.  At the core of season is the gift of peace, anchored in the assurance that God has come near—closer than a heartbeat–and made a home with us.       

–Adapted from my article published in Alive Now, 12/2000.             

 

Vice Patrol

The first writing exercise for the online class in memoir says:  Write about something awful you’ve done in your life.  Dare to be honest. 

I consider this.  Some categories of awful can be ruled out quickly—murder, drug trafficking, fraud, solicitation, bunko.  Tax evasion.  There may be a “Wanted” poster with my picture in the PTO work room at school. 

Various not-proud-of-that moments come to mind.  Are they awful? Worthy of 500 words?  This is what comes from skipping Lent.  I haven’t spent near enough time digging in the shadows, watching at minus tide to see what’s deposited on the ocean floor.    

What I choose for the assignment seems fairly benign on the scale of awful:  a catty remark.  Friends read the exercise and shake their heads, is that really the worst you can come up with?  

Perhaps they know my vices lean towards scarves, gym avoidance, good chocolate, and Dorothy Sayers.  Or travel porn—tour catalogs, articles, memoir-–anything that fuels my lust for Europe.  I’ve been on a Jane bender since January, when Masterpiece Theater began broadcasting Pride & Prejudice. 

Because my nasty remark has bothered me for years, I suspect there is much more to it.  (Emma Woodhouse knows exactly what I mean.)   In the murk of “awful” is more to be found than vice or felony—there’s abuse of class, consumption, resource, power, knowledge, trust.  Dare to be honest.