The wind woke me. It roared in from the west, carrying single-digit temperatures and an arctic bite.
This is cold that takes your breath away, that is no longer bracing but something to brace yourself for.
The bamboo hangs its head, weighted with the white stuff. Maybe the winds will blow it clean.
I just realized (in my typically math-challenged way) that yesterday, the first day of 2014, was also my 1, 200th post. A pleasing synchronicity between calendar and art — even more enjoyable because I was unaware of it until today.
I like to think that there is order in the universe, that such coincidences don’t happen randomly. What purpose could there be in this one? Only this: that any coincidence heightens my belief that there is meaning in creation.
Which leads me to ponder passages from Marilynne Robinson’s essay “Freedom of Thought.”
For almost as long as there has been science in the West, there has been
a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the
physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists
among us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,”
associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the
category of the spiritual. …
If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the
endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of
modern life for which we should all be grateful.
Being grateful for the “endless brilliance of creation” — and believing that it is a creation — these are thoughts I take with me into the new year. That they were triggered by a “random” coincidence, so much the better.
Twelve hours into the new year and it still feels like early morning. One late-night reveler in my family just returned from her evening out. Another sent a text at 3:02 a.m., as if she was ringing in 2014 in California — only she was 20 miles away.
I caught up with our oldest daughter at midnight her time, 6 p.m. here. She was celebrating with fellow Peace Corps volunteers at a work station in northern Benin.
As for me, I woke up unsure whether I was in Virginia or Kentucky.
Disorientation: It’s good for the soul. And not a bad way to begin again.
As the old year passes, I take to the road. No time yet to mull over 2013. That will happen today, when I’m driving.
Meanwhile, a photo I snapped yesterday — sleeping vines, dried tendrils. Not unlike the palm of a hand or the expanse of a road map. Crinkled, worn, main arteries obvious now that leaves have gone.
Here at the cusp of a new year, it’s not hard to see where I’m going, where I’ve been.
Morning comes late out here on the western edge of the eastern time zone. It’s 8 a.m. and the day is still groggy and gray.
If I lived here full-time, I might be less a morning person, more a creature of the night. In summer it’s light here till 10 p.m. and even in winter it’s long past 5 before the day goes away.
I think how far the light has to travel, what it passes on the way. The hills and hollows, cities and towns, birds and trees. Daylight sweeping east to west, bringing us morning … one hour late.
Still thinking trees from yesterday, I snapped a few shots of them on my run. This one has a story.
As I was lining up the picture, I noticed a man making his way to the curb with a small bag of trash. He paused, waited for me to finish before moving forward. It was like we were at the Washington Monument or something.
When I thanked him, he smiled and said: “Do you know what kind of tree that is?”
I admitted that I did not.
“It’s a pumpkin ash. Way out of its range but somehow it survives. It’s called pumpkin ash because of its shape. Probably several hundred years old. Lost a big branch in the ice storm but it’s still here.”
A tree with a story. How many trees have them? More than we think, I bet.
The Bluegrass region of Kentucky is a natural savannah land, and trees here are in short supply. The old oaks, the ones that have been here 100 years or more, are gnarled and magnificent.
They stand sentinel in fields. They rise handily above young maples or pines.
Because trees are scarce here, I notice them more. To come upon one now is to see what a tree can be.
Packages are unwrapped. Christmas leftovers are dwindling. Must be time for New Year’s resolutions.
One of mine is stretching.
I usually carve just enough time out of the day to walk or run. No extra minutes for cooling down.
I’m trying to change that. To come inside, keep the music in my ears and give my muscles time to soften and pull back into place.
There’s only one problem. I walk to think, too, and if the ideas have been bubbling, I need to jot them down before they slip away. So the other day I came up with a solution: writing and stretching at the same time. Sounds crazy, but it works.
Stretching the body, stretching the mind.
Temperature extremes of the last week have us reeling. I walk in shorts and t-shirt one day, in sweat shirt and jacket the next.
A few days ago, in a t-shirt, I walked through air as changeable as water, as strange to the touch as those warm and cool spots you swim through in a spring-fed lake.
It occurred to me then that not only was the air like the water, but the weather was, too. Alternating puddles of days, as mysterious in their origins as those deep currents.
This morning I thought about a scene from one of my
favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the
next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just
learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside
himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the bannister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.
By
the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his
family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way,
after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like
without him — he grabs the bannister knob again. And once again, it
comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still
cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by
friendship and love and solidarity.
Christmas doesn’t take away
our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate
the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw
strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the
miraculous in that.
Photo: Flow TV