Tag: meditations

Posted on

Times and Seasons

Welcome, 2021!

I went to bed last night at 11, being very droopy; but found myself awake at midnight after all, as the city finally let good and loose all the artillery they’d been saving up for the moment. But soon after midnight the storm came in, and I woke much later to the sound of freezing rain against the windows. I may have written ice storms as a meteorological hero for convenience’s sake, but am not a lover of broken tree limbs and downed power lines in real life. However, it soon changed to snow, and it has been snowing steadily all day since.

Out with the old, in with the new.

Some years ago I encountered a passage of Evelyn Underhill meditating on the story of the disciples in the boat in the storm, in which she made the arresting assertion: “The universe is safe for souls.” This was more or less the opposite of what I believed, on a practical level. What I believed, pretty much, was that reality had it in for me. But if I believed this assertion, I thought, what would I do differently? It became a long-term experiment.

The universe is clearly not safe for our bodies, as we have daily proof on multiple levels. But our souls — our selves as a whole, expressed coterminously with the body, mediated through the mind — are affirmative things, as rightful as the universe of which they are part. It’s one of the truest things I can think of, and also one of the hardest to believe.

Last year started hard, and got harder. And the harder it got, the harder I got: in February I woke up one morning so angry I burst into tears; by the time the long course of the pandemic set in — another day, another loss, another day, another injustice — I clung to stoicism like a vine to granite.

2021 is not going to be easy. If there were any illusions to be had about that, they’re like curling sticky-notes, all but fallen already. But I think I need to be soft again. No, I think I need to be like a sword — hard enough to keep an edge, tender enough to spring like steel.

After all, I’m a soul, and I’m here: and that’s an affirmative thing.

May you be supple, strong, and true this year.

Posted on

I gotta skip my prayer meeting

Snow ice cream wants just eagle brand
And I’ve got eagle brand on hand
And I’d rather not walk to the store
Bringing tracks from my boots on the floor
There’s an 8-inch cake of snow on my car
(And my right windshield wiper blade won’t come about)
And things being how they are,
The morning church service is OUT!
So it’s sticking around on the spot:
But tea, loungewear, and ice cream I’ve got!

My filking muscles are atrophied; I’m not sure what else Nathan Detroit would make of my snow holiday. I do, however, know what I am making of my snow holiday: I’m writing. My aftermathy novella is coming along, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that it’s developing a crunchier plot than I prepared myself for. Still, writing is writing, and I think I’ve nearly reached the halfway mark of the piece.

Of course, one can’t spend a snow holiday entirely buried in one’s laptop screen; like everybody else in the city, I had to get out and take pictures and put them on Facebook (obnoxious as it is; note to self — look into getting an Instagram account). People become like small children again, studying the details of the transformed outdoors with earnest enjoyment, shyly waiting till others were out of direct sight to take pictures with their phones.

The gloves I put on for my walk, in a happy serendipity, had a hole in the seam of the right forefinger, and I used it to stir the screen of my phone to take photos, snow lighting wetly on the lighted surface. I took shaky video, too, of drooping branches dotted with berries, of the shifting crunch of my boots as I made my way among the laden branches on the neighborhood sidewalks.

Why? Is it that we can’t help knowing that snow is transient, and therefore want to capture the experience of seeing it, hearing it, being out in it? The way it transforms the everyday look of things and makes them new? My footprints on this walk are visible in the snow — I can see exactly where I’ve come and what my steps look like getting here — but on any other day, I can’t see them. The silence, maybe: the way the snow-filled air wraps one around in a strange acoustic warmth. Maybe those things together make for the urge to reach out — not in the moment, that’s too much a treasure — but right after. On my walk, I met some people and left them to their privacy as I valued mine, but others looked up and smiled, and I greeted them back. I stopped at the entrance to the park to watch families sledding and making snow angels. I almost wanted to take a picture of that too. A picture of the beauty and hardship and holiday and inconvenience that is all so obviously shared by everyone present — a situation — a scene.

Like that old canard about how, when the talk turns to politics or other contentious things, someone suggests: “Let’s talk about the weather.”

Well, why not?