We had far more ice than snow last weekend, but there is something transformative about the stillness of snow. As a year turns, the tranquility of snow brings a feeling of a clean slate. All the old crap of last year is frozen solid, then melts away faster than a million snow cones on a hot summer day at the softball field, leaving only the fresh breath of newness, ripe for the rightness of a new start.
Which, I’ll speak for myself while knowing it isn’t just me, we all need. Therapists often tell patients to write down all their woes and then ball up the paper and throw it into the fire to watch the negativity burn away. But there is also renewal in the power of cold. Take this pine tree farm, for example. It suffered the least amount of loss of any other pine tree farm planted in this area the year it was sown. I remember my husband telling me that he, his father, and his brother were so cold that day that his father’s eyes and nose were stinging and running so heavily that the frigid temperatures made ice crystals all along his eyelashes and mustache and beard. They worked in rotating positions that day. One of them drove the tractor, while the two on the back end were the planters. One would unbundle the frozen saplings, and the other (lying down on the back end facing the ground) pushed them into the earth in spaced out rows. When the foresters asked them what they had done to prevent such loss of trees, they didn’t really know – until they all looked at the calendar and made some comparisons of data. They’d planted the Johnson Funny Farm pines on the coldest day of the year.
If pine trees thrive when they’re planted on the coldest day of the year, I like to imagine that this cold and snow and ice have repotted people, too. I’ve needed a hard reset for well over a year now, and my sapling spirits-at-heart have needed a re-rooting.
That is what the stillness of snow does. It brings a magical reset, filled with a Narnia-like magic to all the possibilities for the year ahead. And there are snowflake pictures for Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, too.
As I stood on the porch so many times taking in all the beauty last weekend, I couldn’t dismiss the feelings of sadness and fear that I felt for my California friends evacuating from the wildfires at the opposite end of the cold spectrum, on the opposite side of the country. I reached out and checked on them, and they replied that they are fine but are keeping heightened awareness of the fires. I continue praying for their safety.
it speaks for itself
the snow, silently falling
blanketing the hush
Common Threads 