Snowy Resistance

Last fall the Old Farmer's Almanac and other weather sources predicted a harsh winter for northern Illinois and Chicago based on temperature and precipitation. December was cold, snowy, and windy with drifts. January, by contrast, has been a messy, diverse mix of weather. There's been no snow, a combination of frigid and mild temperatures, less winter wind than we often have, freezing rain, rain accompanied by thunder, and tons of fog. Both rain and fog quickly consume accumulated snow. Looking across this broad landscape in every direction, I only see remaining snow in two places. There are shrinking, dirty mounds where December plows piled up the snow, and there's still snow caught in the swirl of our monarch waystation. As more days of rain and fog come and go, stubborn snow in the waystation visualizes sturdy resistance.

We began to claim a swirl of land for the intentional planting of milkweed and a blend of other prairie native plants and shrubs in 2014. This spiral of cultivated land wraps around a beautiful fire pit behind my home. Our waystation is part of a multi-state effort in the middle of the US to restore sufficient habitat to nurture the annual monarch migration from Mexico to Canada and back again and to support a variety of pollinators who are essential to our food chain. The waystation is our commitment to share the journey with other creatures, acknowledging our critical connections. It requires us to resist the impulse to only look at the earth and its wellbeing from a human perspective. Between growing seasons, its snowy beauty lies in reminding us to resist whatever whittles away widening circles of life around us. Dried stalks and bare branches clearly cry out now: “Decide for life. Act for life. Be the most embracing life possible.”

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Winter:To Like It or Not

A friend of mine on a high desert mesa in New Mexico who reads this blog commented to me a few weeks ago that she finds fewer and fewer people who relish winter. The picture above does not come from northern Illinois in the winter. I knelt down beside this strong-willed green while visiting a friend in the Tampa area last weekend. It was a different earth encounter from those I usually have in January. I've spent relatively little time in warm places during the dark, chilly months of the year. When I returned home after four days in Florida, even with snowy roads, followed by strong prairie winds gusting to 60 mph, and the expectation of freezing rain to come, I was glad to re-enter my realm of “real winter.” I'm one of the relishers. I understand that makes no sense to many.

From the time I was a small child in upstate New York, I looked forward to the growing darkness of late November and December. I imagine I tasted mystery there. During many years of inner city life and work in Saint Louis, where snow is periodic and then a pain for many, I tended to be quiet regarding my winter love. I was joyful though on the occasional nights when ragged city neighborhoods took on such magical beauty under a blanket of snow. Back north now, I've come face to face with winter's powerful invitations to dormancy, waiting, uncertainty, challenge, and recognition of limitations. For a terminally responsible person like me, those prairie winter realities are a good balance, especially when I'm not on the road. Winter's palette is narrow in color but often rich in surprise when we slow to attention and explore the subtle. It isn't for everyone, but indeed I do relish winter.

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Oxygen Soup

My mother was an excellent soup maker. I've followed in her footsteps. Where I live, winter is the premier soup season. With snowy roads, a bottomless drop in the temperature, the threat of ice, and prairie winds making buildings mown, soup is a welcome addition. Soup's never the same twice, making good use of planned ingredients and random ones on hand. Simmering soup flavors permeate any space in which we dwell. This hearty and filling nourishment warms one long beyond the spoon's final scrape across the bottom of the bowl.

Soon after a promised winter wind with 60 mph gusts arrived yesterday, I was hunkered around the writing table with one of the groups I facilitate. We were playing with two word combinations that began with the letters “o” and “s.” Whimsical, expected, surprising, and serious options were shouted out. One woman came up with oxygen soup. We loved it. I imagined a mixed-media open studio space by that name. We fantasized about a cafe with additional new menu items to complement oxygen soup.

The concept of oxygen soup remained with me well into the evening as fierce winds tore at my home with their frigid drafts of air. I considered the literal mix of what we bring together and throw into the metaphoric pot so that all might breathe with deep freedom. This is about fundamentals. It invites the active partnership of us all. I will probably never be a part of a studio space or cafe by the name of Oxygen Soup, but that won't keep me from exploring the optimal ingredients already among us for our oxygen soup efforts. Soup isn't necessarily in a stock pot. It emerges in the sustenance of what we do, say, intend, and lean toward with hope. Calling all oxygen soup makers!

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Winter Solstice

Just minutes ago it became winter. For months weather forecasts have predicted a demanding winter in northern Ilinois this year with more snow and cold temperatures than usual. December has aligned with what those forecasts promised in days darkening early. The major player in winter's drama on the prairie is the wind. With the smallest of resources other than itself, the wind can keep things dicey for hours or days. Where the land is open, it shapes light snow into slithering snakes of white drifting quickly and blurring the road beneath vehicles by day and night. If they were rattlesnakes instead of snow snakes, they would be called a rhumba. Snaking snow doesn't wait long to become a dangerous, swirling dance. Wisdom lies in slowing down, even reconsidering optional travel. When winter is feeling it's fury and sheltering in place is recommended, isolation hovers over the land alongside the chilling wind.

Recently I made the acquaintance of David Whyte's poem, “Everything is Waiting for You.” The poet bursts bounds of loneliness celebrating the voices and presence of ordinary objects and the sweep of nature all around. For him there is the invitation of intimate conversation with the stairs, the doors, the singing kettle, and the world's birds and creatures. As I learn to breathe with winter again, I am mindful of the traffic jam of rabbit prints on a fresh drawn sheet of morning snow, the delicate bird feather dropped gently by my rural mailbox, and the hunting hawk on a near-full-moon night almost grazing the top of my car. In that remembrance, I resist what Whyte calls the great mistake of acting as if I'm alone. I embrace alertness that he characterizes as “the hidden discipline of familiarity.” I say, “Hello winter, brimming with friends, both old and unmet.”

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Stilled

Temperatures are frigid today, thirty degrees less than they were a year ago. The temperature has kept falling through late morning. By 9 am it was -6 but it felt like -33. The world is frozen and still, only interrupted by the very cold scrap of an occasional snow plow or the whirring of the wind drifting snow into artistic mounds. When I was a child in upstate New York and winter froze nearby Hoopes Pond, I threw my ice skates over my shoulder and walked night or day the few blocks to the park where we skated until our legs began to wooble and our cheecks could take in no more cold. As my friends and I reached junior high age, we could go on Friday night to a small, old fashioned boathouse in someone's family. It sat right on Owasco Lake, one of the Finger Lakes. Often we had to shovel off a large enough space on the icy lake for skating. An outdoor bonfire provided light and warmth. When my older daughter reached an age where she could learn to skate, we stopped regularly at one of the 366 frozen ponds Plymouth County, Massachusetts claims to have, night or day, and skated for a few minutes. The cold was exhilarating and exciting.

On Northern Illinois prairie lands the cold is more ferocious. A typical wind, cold temperatures, and moisture on the road combine into dangerous, hard-as-glass surfaces. The weather commands one's respect. On a weekend morning like this, we burrow in like hibernating animals or wait like seeds in the dormant ground. We're also aware there are some not far away for whom lack of shelter is a perennial issue. Events are cancelled. Winter's limitations shock our flow into stillness. Winter's an unavoidable teacher with challenging lessons.

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Untitled

Just a few weeks back, these dried milkweed pods were splitting open to set loose on the wind hundreds and hundreds of seeds, each suspended from white fluff. The seeds are gone now. Once again the pods are covered with what is light, white, and prone to be airborne. This white is the white of snow, almost mimicking the previous seed fluff. Milkweed seeds like many other perennial seeds have to stratify in the cold moisture of winter. In a time when winter temperatures seem to put all growing things to sleep, that same cold, hopefully accompanied by moisture, is necessary for the seeds to stratify before awakening to germinate. After autumn seeds disperse, the snow piled atop and inside the empty pod reminds us that the accumulating snow on the ground is essential for the scattered seeds to bring forth another summer's plants. Many of a pod's hundreds of seeds will fail to stratify. Seeds get eaten, rot on the ground, or fall on an inhospitable surface, such as a driveway, where they cannot grow.

Looking at those snow-weighted pods I consider the Monarchs who will lay their eggs on next year's leggy milkweed, followed in turn by caterpillars who will only feast on milkweed leaves in anticipation of the chrysalis stage preceding their wings. That whole cycle begins in what might be misunderstood to be simply life-defying, harsh, winter weather. With the milkweed, we recall that everything we seed and start will not survive to flourish. The milkweed faces us with the wisdom of what awakens us for growth. Tough situations, unfriendly conditions, and all that might defeat us can draw us out into the tentative birth of new life. Milkweed is a good winter mentor through the chilly wait for the not yet, coming seasons of growth.

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Cold Weather Nest

As November ages, the descent into winter cold and diminishing light appears to accelerate. Memories of growth still. For me, one of the beautiful aspects of right now in northern climates is that the underlying structure of summer's fullness is in plain sight. The remains of tall prairie plants reveal what held up all the blooms a few months ago. Late fall into winter brings into view the underneath for us. From the time I first inhabited my own space, a college dorm room, I have gathered bunches of dried off-season plant material to tuck in the corner of at least one room. In quiet voice, it speaks to the essence of what is still there after all the seasonal shedding.

This week I was thrilled to discover a robin's nest with its long messy strands on the naked, outstretched branch of a tree in my front yard. The land where I live brims with robins in the birthing months. Some nests are easy to spy on a window ledge, drain pipe, or swaying branch of a pine tree. Others only make themselves known when robins and leaves are gone. Since nests that survive winter's windy fury are often used in a subsequent season, that nest out my front window is both recollection and promise, pointing to the nurturing of new life. We can't always glimpse that nurturing within us or around us. It has happened and it will happen again if we and the broad reach of creation that is our home cooperate with the impulse for life. Winter offers a stretch of time for us to ponder being protective spaces for coming life. When it's too icy or cold to venture out, I will pause, focusing on the nest with its call for each one to shelter life.

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Paying Attention with Georgia O’Keeffe

Nobody sees a flower really. To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. (Georgia O'Keeffe)

Georgia O'Keeffe would have been 129 today. Best known for her paintings, she is also remembered for terse poetic lines including the one above. Georgia reminds us of the heart of spirituality — always and ever to pay attention. Attention is a warp thread in the weave of both seeing and friendship. Paying attention is a slow process. It isn't efficient, never meeting strict production goals.

Georgia paid profound attention to her adopted New Mexico landscape in and around Abiquiu where she lived full time the last thirty-nine years of her long life. High desert light, hills, clouds, the river, cottonwoods, dry waterfalls, her iconic bones, and the flinty Pedernal all captured her attention. She said that God would give her Pedernal if she painted it enough. In fact the intensity of her attention resulted in an intimacy with her surroundings that can still be felt thirty years after her death. When I was training as a spiritual director, my five residential weeks were at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, one casa down the road from where Georgia painted in the summer. In that harsh, ever-changing beauty, her spirit hovers like a living presence.

It isn't necessary for us to paint if we would take seriously her example of daily listening to the land we inhabit. We can make the choice to befriend the place where we are, to take the time to know it beneath the surface. All that is around us has a voice. If we tend to be in a hurry, are distracted, or can't put down our electronic devices, such voices will go unheard by us. Try ten minutes, an hour, or a day paying attention as Georgia did.

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Go Gently

I'm a labyrinth walker and facilitate labyrinth walks with others. Labyrinths have been found across cultures and traditions around the globe for over 5000 years. In traditional and contemporary forms, the labyrinth is a unicursal (single) pathway winding back and forth, in and out, toward and away from the center. The labyrinth provides a walking meditation or prayer path. It can free your mind, ground you in time and space, and invite you to trust the path with its multiple twists and turns. Labyrinth walking alone or with others, is a practice for community building, creativity, healing, innovation, peacemaking, ritual and ceremony, self-reflection, spiritual insight, and stress reduction.

Last evening I facilitated a moonlit walk for a group of about twenty youth and their advisors. It was a cold, clear night, just above freezing, with stars strewn overhead. Under the rising super moon that will be full in a couple of days, light bounced off the white rocks that outline this labyrinth's eleven circuits. Everything was just right, and the group responded with wide and open presence.

I returned to this large outdoor labyrinth this afternoon for a walk with good friends. I have walked this labyrinth multiple times in the past, but today beneath my feet its soft, sandy path was overwhelming. This prominent softness echoed words of a friend who often counsels “Go gently.” We're wise to go gently now with those who are vulnerable around us, with whatever feelings we have after a turbulent election season, with any whose opinions are different from ours, and with every corner where fear and violence lurk. Gentleness is not weak. Over the long haul gentleness has a reliable spine of steel. It allows us to reach out, relate, and be just, truthful, insistent, and inclusive where we are most needed.

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Nature’s Piggy Banks

I don't remember ever having a piggy bank as a child. I did have a small porcelain bowl in the corner of a kitchen drawer. Once a week I received a nickel to put in that bowl. Time passed, and all those nickels were jammed in a red leather, heart-shaped, change purse. It closed with a zipper. In the summer just before I turned five, I was clutching that beloved red heart change purse in my hand as we clamored over huge glaciated boulders on one of the 1000 Islands in the Saint Lawrence River between Ontario, Canada and upstate New York. In an instant I lost my grip on that purse as it slid through the deep and narrow space between two boulders. Maybe I've always loved the combination of oversized rock and powerful water because once I unexpectedly deposited my treasure there.

Many fall seed pods remind me of that overstuffed red heart change purse of long ago, my version of a piggy bank. Split-open pods reveal an abundance of seeds, seemingly numberless like my nickels. Seed pods release a promise of growth over the horizon. They empty themselves in an utter act of generosity, spewing out every seed in their packed treasure trove. There's no concern for a prudent, guaranteed investment; seeds are not saved for another day. Instead they are given over to the wind for a wild ride. Milkweed seeds like these of the orange milkweed require winter's cold to stratify before the chance they might take root and rise up to nourish next year's monarch caterpillars. The abundant and generous give-away of one autumn will be repeated the next year. How do they trust that what they grow to offer will be renewed? Can you and I trust a similar movement in our lives?

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