The cold is here.
It will freeze hard some night soon. I’ve already taken the spent annuals out of the pots, enjoying working outside in the warm sun. I’ve had the furnace checked. Gotten a flu shot. Had lunch at a sidewalk café last week: The air was clear; the red and gold leaves vibrant, electric; everything more precious because the cold is coming again.
I like some things about winter, but dread others. I feel more vulnerable then, and the increased darkness is foreboding. And it’s so long.
I’m planting my tulip bulbs this week. I’m reminded of what the writer E.B. White observed when he saw his wife planting tulip bulbs in late October in Kansas: “There she was, calmly plotting the resurrection.”
Resurrection may be hard-wired into us in more ways than we think. In our trust that spring will come again, that the sun will rise tomorrow, and that winter has gifts that will come to us unexpectedly.
Nonetheless, am amassing resources for the long haul. Here is a meditation from one on whom I rely a lot, Bishop Steven Charleston:
“Here is a prayer for the hollow places, for the hollow people, for the emptiness inside. How often our lives are determined by the need to fill something within us, something stolen away when we were small, something that has long gone missing. So tender is this space we rarely speak of it in public, but shelter down in our souls to hold it hidden. It can make us brittle. It can make us rage or cry or fear. We can seek to fill it with power or pills, drink or drama, but wake more empty than before. Come good Spirit and give us the love that heals the hollow we know but never name.”
And that healing is resurrection.
See you in church.
Barbara.
