Midwinter of the spirit

When darkness falls, tend to the candle of your spirit.

On the longest night, sing a song to the sun — that invincible god who burns, yet is not consumed. 

Whisper a blessing to Earth, the Beloved who holds us so close to her, in life and in death. 

Now — at the still point — we remember those who have returned to the earth's womb. 

We wonder what is to come.

We wait — and while we wait, we dream of the blue snow of deep midwinter, lit by the moon's bright chariot and the shine of ice-bound stars.

On the longest night, the fire grows low. 

Hold fast to your evergreen hope. Your red-berried joy. That glowing star that lives deep inside of you, even on the coldest, darkest night. 

And do not let go.  

The Longest Night from Angie Pickman on Vimeo.

Harbingers

Tearing black-cloaked along the wind's leading edges, the crows stir the storm.

They magic forth a fine but purposeful snow—driving flakes from the northern reaches of the world.

Already the snow shapes small constellations of winter on my rooftop.

And the crows, swirling in restless spirals, catch the air under their wings and dance in the timeless space between tree, snow and sky, loving the wind above all else.


Photographer unknown.

Fits and starts

Now let the snow retreat, withdrawing its hands from the north lands, peninsulas shrinking to fingers, fingers dissolving into crackle-ice that shatters under our feet. Let rough-crystalled islands shrink back into the thirsty earth and open paths and thoughts untrodden for many months.

Winter and spring will keep dancing a while longer. After a few days of major melting, wet snow fell one evening last week, softening and blurring the edges.

You see that I have exchanged the snowflake on my front door for the songbird of spring as a bit of sympathetic magic.

I am in a similar uneasy transition between one way of being and another. Back in that old push-pull state, trading the hours that I had in abundance for a salary and benefits.

Above all, I don't want sitting at a computer all day, in an office with no daylight, to make me lose or forget connection with what's real and what's central: The land, the river, the birds, trees and sky.

Here's what I know. Almost every day, I have an encounter with an other-than-human being that lights up my world. A sight that makes my eyes overflow with beauty and my heart swell with love.

This sacred planet we live upon and are part of is speaking to us, calling our attention to it and then sending love at us. I can only think that there is a conversation going on. Energy, attention, love, gratitude. We have to be paying attention to hear it. And if I stay away or starve myself of this conversation for too long, I feel all wrong.

In the park-that-was-oak-savanna today, a blue-sky day but cold, I went walking. I'd been feeling low on energy, a bit down.

I heard a sound up in the trees. A crooning, confiding, avian sound that swivels my head around, sends my eyes searching for the source.

Two full-grown bald eagles huddled side-by-side on a high branch with a wide view of the river gorge, backs to the wind. Looking for rabbits in the undergrowth, fish in the thawing water, maybe. Maybe resting, being companionable, maybe preening each other's feathers. I do not know the ways of eagles, yet that's no barrier to loving them.

If they hadn't made those sounds (low kuk-kuk-kuk call) and if I hadn't taken a detour from my own thoughts or my living room couch, I would not have noticed them at all, these magnificent feathered kin on their high branch.

I send them winged thanks and watch until they glide down a current of air over the river bluff, out of sight.

Blessed, smiling and definitely lighter of heart, I walk on in the cold sunshine of earliest spring.

The singing cardinal of winter

THIS LONG WINTER has been hard. Winter is a hardship.

Hard for our wild relations, who struggle to find food and stay warm.

Hard for bloggers (weather woes are widespread, from California to Canada to Devon).

Hard for lovers of the outdoors who are not equipped with high-tech cold weather gear and must retreat too quickly into dry, furnace-fired, unwild air.

Hard for homeowners who live on corner lots and must shovel out their walkways and driveways by hand, in a winter of 50+ inches of snow (ahem). The frost line has crept down so far into the earth that even in the southern half of the state, underground water pipes have frozen and burst.

Hard for the roads--which, after months of warming, refreezing, chemicals and plow blades, have given up holding themselves together and have already disintegrated, leaving potholes of epic dimensions--and the drivers who must negotiate them during blizzards, Winter Storm Warnings, Snowmageddons and Snowpocalypses.

In previous winters, I would have been whining about winter with the best of them.

I don't know what has happened, or how it's happened, but my inner kaleidoscope has shifted and all the colored shards have lined up in a less pointy and jagged configuration. After decades of living here, finally I accept that winter is a time of hardship.

A sensible position--but one I've mostly managed to avoid up to this point.

Anyway, how ridiculous is it to resist winter? It is a fact impossible to ignore or wage battle on. Resistance does nothing to make it go away--it just puts one at odds with what is beyond our power to change, with what is ever-so-emphatically-real and HERE.

And resistance to reality just makes it impossible to love your life and where you are in it every day, doesn't it?

So, thinking of winter as a time of hardship feels right to me. If a person isn't experiencing this season's hardships, then she isn't being present to it at all. And I want to be here, not constantly living a life wishing I were elsewhere.

The paradox is, as I let go of resistance to the hardships of winter, these things became something to just get on with and negotiate, without drama or martyrdom.

Hardships are hard; but it doesn't follow that "hard" equals "bad." (I make this distinction to myself because for most of my life I have been exactly the kind of person who sees "hard" as "bad.")

But the hard-not-bad hardship is not the only thing to notice about this winter.

Just as much, more than anything maybe, is the beauty: A balm, and a blessing, and a long, cold, strange song of north wind.

And oh my love, my shining white ice palace of a home, with your snow-heaped silences, your singing cardinal at dawn, your white radiance flooding through every window and your utter and exquisite loveliness from dawn to dusk, you bring tears to my eyes. You fill up my heart as never before, and I am grateful.

For my love

Snow is like a heart: An impressionable surface of deep-struck patterns, a hider of secrets, a wild shapeshifter, a master of disguise.

Each heart has its own geography...bright and shadowed lands, jumbled gleams swept by unseen winds, fed by mythic rivers. 

This silver-pale sun is still fire enough to light us toward spring, my love. 

Every word of every tongue is

Love telling a story to her own ears.

Every thought in every mind,

She whispers a secret to her own Self.

Every vision in every eye,

She shows her beauty to her own sight.

Every smile on every face,

She reveals her own joy for herself to enjoy.

Love courses through everything,

No, Love is everything.

How can you say, there is no love,

when nothing but Love exists?

All that you see has appeared because of Love.

All shines from Love,

All pulses with Love,

All flows from Love--

No, once again, all IS Love!

~ Fakhruddin Iraqi

In the kingdom of the wind

WIND awoke in the darkness, and blew.

He rattled old windows, waking us from dreams of hearth fires and long summer days.

He reshaped the world to his purposes, which we do not know.

In his kingdom, no wall or window can hold him back.

WIND swallowed banked snow and exhaled it in drifts along the edges of walkways and roads....

 In his kingdom, straight edges are frowned upon.

WIND yanked rattling seeds from the ghost-bone-tree across the street....

In his kingdom, what is scattered is often gathered; but if not, no matter.

It is the cleansing and the scattering that counts.

WIND made snow devils that danced under my feet, whisked around corners, waved in long, icy banners like a blessing scarf....*

In his kingdom, there is no such thing as stillness, and chimes are made to be rung at midnight and dawn.

WIND wrote a snow map that I followed for only a moment, until coldness began to chew my flesh.


I fled before his teeth.


In his fierce northern kingdom, there is one simple law: Find a burrow. Or perish.












*credit to Robert Macfarlane in Mountains of the Mind for this simile, which he uses while writing about the summit of the Tibetan mountain Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the Sky (ie, Mt. Everest). 

Winter in three parts

Part 1.
I was surprised to find the magazine “Men’s Journal” in my mail today. I checked the label. Maybe my husband had developed a heretofore-unknown-to-me interest in articles like “How to Trim a Beard” or “The Truth About Herbal Supplements.”

But no, the carrier had delivered it by mistake. It was meant to go to a gentleman living a block away. And how disappointed he would be if he had no magazine to read on these frozen January nights, which is what would happen if I just chucked it in the recycling bin.

So I pulled on the jacket, the boots, the mittens, the hat with faux-fur-lined ear flaps, and the infinity scarf (for the infinity winter), dodged the cats hovering around the door, and ventured out into what Minnesotans fondly refer to as “the tundra.”

Thirteen degrees. (That is -10.5556 degrees to the rest of the world.) Bright sun lancing off the fresh fall of snow. Cold, cold wind from the north, the direction in which I was walking. A brisk and beautiful day, actually, with all the diamond brilliance of deep winter above and below, if you could just raise your face from out your scarf for a moment to see it.

On the way home, I saw a Pomeranian wearing a white-and-red doggie coat dash out into the intersection, all the while barking at the wheels of a giant blue dump truck that was trying to make a turn. The little dog so small, brave and foolish. He came to no harm. The driver kept his foot on the brake until the dog’s person came puffing up and nabbed him. Pom scolded and held tightly in his person’s arms, smile on my face then and even now.

It takes a while to feel warm again after going out. I switched on the heating pad to bring my toes up to room temperature as I sat writing. But after a while, I felt the westering sun reach through the window to cup my elbow, then stroke its warm golden fingers along my arm, like the hand of a friend.

Part 2.
January’s sun is low in the sky. Any cloud not directly overhead looks damson-hued, colored like sunset all day long.

The other night, snow was falling as I drove home through the park, whirling down from the misting gray clouds like fairy handkerchiefs. And the song went: White snow, black branches, gray sky. The elemental story, the original lullaby, the essential shapes of the winter, all singing cold, sleeping songs like water rippling, fire burning. Did you know that cold burns like fire?

Tonight, the full moon shines in the east, exquisitely wreathed by gauzy cloud, softest pearl edged with opal. That aurora whispers of hypnotic snowfalls soon-to-come in a language the night birds seem to hear. I see them—first, a mass of black crows, then mallards silhouetted against the murk, winging southeast along the corridor of the Mississippi River, flying with the prevailing winds.

Part 3.

So you must persist 

in asking where my heart goes

all the long, cold night. 

Like following trails left by birds

who vanished with yesterday’s sky.

—Japanese poet Kōhō Kennichi, 

    translated by Sam Hamill

Running stitches across snow

Winter is a time for tracks. 

Journeys that in other seasons leave no record are imprinted beneath our feet merely by the act of walking. Boot prints and rabbit bounds, ski-slides and bird-whispers...all visible stories that catch the chilly light and long blue shadows of January.

“Stories, like paths, relate in two senses: they recount and they connect,” writes Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot.

“Our verb ‘to write’ at one point in its history referred specifically to track-making: the Old English writan meant ‘to incise runic letters in stone’; thus one would ‘write’ a line by drawing a sharp point over and into a surface—by harrowing a track.

As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.”

“Paths and their markers have long worked on me like lures: drawing my sight up and on and over. The eye is enticed by a path, and the mind’s eye, also. The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in the land—onwards in space, but also backwards in time to the histories of a route and its previous followers. 

“As I walk paths I often wonder about their origins, the impulses that have led to their creation, the records they yield of customary journeys, and the secrets they keep of adventures, meetings and departures.”

Macfarlane is an exceptional prose stylist, master of a deep vocabulary with which to describe the landscape and its forms. While reading this wide-ranging book, I kept a pen at the ready to record (i.e., map) all the unfamiliar words I encountered. Schooled! 

(If these quotes entice you to read the book, note that there is a glossary at the end that defines most of these terms...discovered upon finishing the book.)

The Old Ways: An Idiosyncratic Map of Geographical Mystifcation:

Lochan, rinky, trods, desire lines, hodology, sublunary, biogeography, foil [track], corpse roads, leys, drongs, sarns, snickets, shieling, bison roads, grey wethers, sarsens, hoarstones, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, carneys, herepaths, bindle-skiffs, kist, scarp, gneiss, esculent, weald, corry, ortholith, cromack, alterity, geans, batholith, ling, schists, boustrophedon, massif, sintering, bathyspheric, hominin, panjandrum, stravaiger, frails [leaf], marly, corbelled, scurfed off, pachinko, chert, skip (noun), dabbing cloth, sedulous, lenticuler, albedo, chiasmic, hierophany, cursus, xenotopia, chrism, exigesis, vertex, oneiric, blebs, conduplicate, involute, dupel, glaucous, candle-blacking, coombe/combe, beech ahngers, atavism, phragmites, bodging, fissile, Lob, infaunal, marram, seracs.

Photos: Lake Nokomis, Minneapolis, MN

The longest month

This is how the world outside my window looked this morning. 

I finally got geared-up for a run yesterday about ten minutes after the freezing rain started. Already the sidewalks were coated with a pebbled, opaque ice, treacherous for running. The middle of the street was mostly clear, due to the chemicals and wheels, so I ran there. But I'd only covered half a mile before even the asphalt iced over, so I turned around and walked home in slightly soggy defeat, flinching as the occasional ice pellet bounced off my face.  

Blessings of the snow came later in a whirl of pelting flakes, when I happened to catch sight of a Northern Harrier—a species of small hawk—perched on the fence outside the kitchen window. Maybe attracted by the small birds at my backyard feeder. Enchanted by her wild presence—the royal autumn plumage of rich, brown-and-white-and-black-speckled feathers, puffed up against the cold, and a burning yellow eye—I stared at her, murmuring praise all the while.

And since harriers have exceptional hearing, it could have been the faint sounds of my human words that sent her sweeping off toward the north, tilting against the swirling, white wind. (Am I the only one who finds it difficult to keep my praise and delight to myself when coming face-to-face with such wonders? Which reminds me of something Treebeard said in The Lord of the Rings: "Elves began it, of course, waking trees up and teaching them to speak and learn their tree talk; they always wished to talk to everything, the old Elves did.")

Now the pretty icing of snow has melted off the gingerbread cottage, the shoveling is done, and the harrier is off hunting mice by the light of the Wolf Moon. The longest month is almost over.

Snow dreams

"The long white ragged lines were drifting and sifting across the street, across the faces of the old houses, whispering and hushing, making little triangles of white in the corners between cobblestones, seething a little when the wind blew them over the ground to a drifted corner; and so it would be all day, getting deeper and deeper and growing more and more silent."

—Conrad Aiken, Silent Snow, Secret Snow

"I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat."

—Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Under cover

Snow sugared down as I walked along the river gorge, the sky heavily veiled by gray-white streamers of cloud over cloud. 

Fine, icy pellets stung my cheeks; before long, the damp wind snuck under my jacket and around the edges of my hat, which were not quite warm enough for my meandering pace. Especially not for bare-handed photography. 

But walking through the subtle layers and patterns of this day was pulling me into wordlessness. And that's what I was seeking, after all. So I tucked my hands into my sleeves and let the low light quietly disclose some secret caches.

This showing-not-showing, revealing-yet-hiding, had a playful quality...

Lacking the distraction of color, the winter world is delineated by shape and texture; all gracefully curving forms and exquisite points, pattern on pattern, rich as a William Morris damask. 

Copper and flaxen oak leaves huddle together companionably, making hobo homes in boot prints from an earlier snowfall.

The leaves even danced playfully around this ice boulder. Recalling my cat when she hides on the other side of the laundry basket piled with clothes, daring me to catch her, if I can...

...and I never can, unless she lets me.

Even something as prosaic as parking stripes take on a ghostly, topographic quality, as the flying snow snakes and writhes and chases itself across the asphalt.

Then I slipped back out of wordlessness and into coldness, and hurried back to my car to take turns holding the reddened fingers of each hand up to the heating vents as I drove for home, where coffee was waiting.