Among the Gifts of Winter

It was brisk this morning as I walked around the house to release the chickens – “brisk” being a euphemistic gloss on the truth that it was bitterly cold.  A few wisps of snowflakes fluttered in the light breeze, and then a few more until, by the time I finished my morning ministrations, the world around me looked like the playful cascade from a pillow fight somewhere up in the mottled sky.  As quickly emptied, however, as it had been torn open, the downy flakes thinned and soon disappeared.  Only the cold and the bluing sky remained.

 

Our afternoon trail walk through the woods behind our house was intermittently lovely and scary; repeated thawing and refreezing transforming the fluffy snow into glacial ice.  We held on – walking stick in one hand, neighboring branches in the other – all the while smiling at the beauty despite the peril.  Deer prints – along with less desirable evidence of their passing – mark the clearings.  Bird nests, exposed now in the leafless branches, sway in the upper reaches of the trees.  Fallen branches and twigs – the fruit of nature’s pruning – carpet the ground and we occasionally pause to clear the woody obstructions.  

 

This is the readying way of the woods:  autumn and winter’s descent prefiguring spring and summer’s ascent.  Life, become death, become decay, become soil, become food for life reborn.  Life as circle, not line.  Living as both constant rehearsal and perpetual performance.  Resurrection as the way rather than the exception – all of our days an undulation of dyings and risings.  

 

Kicking aside another fallen branch, I wonder what is being pruned in me?  Studying the nest high overhead, I wonder what eggs are being laid in my soul and how to nourish the nascent stirrings that will crack and emerge from them?  What breezes and rains will green them like the prairie grasses we skirt as we pick our way home?

 

Who knows? 

It’s winter still, and the composting past is yet doing its gestational work.  

But color, I’m confident, will one of these days emerge from it.  Beauty, nectar, fruit perhaps, and fecund strength.  

 

These, among the gifts of winter.