good morning

Home is lovely, from the twinkly twig of a tree in the living room, already encompassed by wrapped gifts, to even the frigid outer extremeties of the drafty upstairs and dank basement "junk" room. All my shopping is tucked under my fat black belt, and I've been content to drink coffee and study the boisterous life of my household. A pot brews even as I sit here listening to Fleet Foxes in the darksome stillness of early morning, not a creature otherwise stirring, not even my dog. Who, by the way, is adjusting rather well to the pace of things here in Michigan, aside from displaying a new streak of recalcitrance when it comes to returning indoors when she's called from her outdoor adventures. I'm out of practice commanding a leash and she's out of practice submitting to one, but we manage.

It wouldn't be a journey home if there were no revelations. I've had a few. Snow is always a revelation, a keen reminder that if I remain in the south my heart will never be whole. My favorite moments have been evening walks on Elmwood Lake with Janie, outstriding the gasping mental refrain of shit shit shit its cold until you realize your heart is singing beautiful beautiful joy joy joy to the winter sky with its streaked luminosities, to the crunchy snow underfoot and the black-stubbled fields to your left, the cloudy iced pond to your right holding blurred lights plundered from the houses on its far border, the one evergreen halfway down the path, its branches festooned with champagne bulbs. The way the cold has of befriending you after its initial rebuff. The way dark and wind and snow and glittering distant lights make you feel strong and alive, as though your body is the substance not only of God's breath, but of God's own laughter.

Other revelations can keep, need time to work on me. Meanwhile, it is almost Christmas and I feel free and fervent as a bird. Time for a cup of coffee and an early dip into the Word.

Today after work I'll be picking up my car, loading my belongings, shooing Janie into the passenger seat, and striking off for the snowy Midwest and a white Christmas. Hopefully this year's journey will prove less eventful than Christmas 2008, which found a much younger Janie and a much less competent me wedged in a ditch awaiting a tow truck while the snow fell lavishly and insensibly down upon us. I am very eager for the long drive, which always affords me leisure to be silent and thoughtful, and also to sing at the top of my lungs without fear of human censure. Janie might not like it much.

For now, I have much to do before my four new tires hit the pavement of I-24. I want no unfinished work dulling the shine of my departure.

the importance of being earnest

I'm remembering Annie Dillard's Journey to the Pole, and the way she spoke of our strange fondness for penguins. We find them endearing because we see in their biped waddling and earnest bobbing a humorous caricature of ourselves. Perhaps, she muses, a similar relationship exists between humans and God. Perhaps he finds the fumblingly determined circus of our lives endearing because in it he sees a humorous caricature of his own great work.

Maybe if I thought more often about how all my grave pontificating, my frenzied efforts to act beautifully and graciously and uprightly, must strike him (who is the possessor in full of all that I dimly echo), I would find myself spreading my hands in sheepish acknowledgment of how clueless I really am. I would laugh with him.

I don't mean to disparage the wonderful truth about God's image, how my nature is stamped with it. I'm awed when I consider that I cannot but emulate my Creator, that he has intended it to be so and does indeed delight in it. Nevertheless, so often I forget that the flipside of that awe is humility: a recognition of the gulf between the Creator and his sin-darkened image in my frail soul. The idea that I have ever felt a moment's self-importance should elicit my most deserving derision.

It is important to be earnest. I ought to spend my life tirelessly pursuing perfect godliness. It is, in part, what I'm here to do.

But before that, I am here to take a good hard look at my outrageous self, and a good hard look at the Beauty that delights in me. And I am to spread my hands towards him and laugh, trusting him to do the work of teaching me how my earnest, godlike emulation delights him best.

Before anything else, I am here to adore.

uncautionary tale

Since everyone knows that you cannot properly celebrate a snowday from indoors, no matter how panoramic the view commanded by your living room windows, I bundled myself into a winter jacket, tucked my jeans into my battered Slovakia boots, whistled for Janie, and followed her out my front door after closing my blog entry last Saturday.

It was nine o'clock a.m., and the sky wore more layers than I did. Even so, the sunshine managed to glow through its cloudy bundling and ignite the white on every bristling twig and trodden leaf. The air smelled metallic with the cold. It rang in my ears.

I picked a direction and went forth. Several moments of uphill trudging later and the woods had closed over my house, leaving me swallowed in black and white. Janie chased ahead of me and looped behind me and kept plunging her face into the snow and licking it, delighted at our excursion. I kept walking.

That is how I got lost in my own front yard. I won't speak for Janie. No doubt she knew the way home, but was delighted at the prolonged ramble. Were it not for the muffled rush of Scenic Highway serving to awaken my seriously faulty inner compass, we might be wandering there still, in a wasteland of mud and crusted snowpatches. As it was, it took me miles of walking parallel to the highway to realize that I was headed in the wrong direction and to correct my error. Suffice it to say, I'm no girl scout.

By the time Janie's bark announced our arrival to our own familiar gravel drive, I was quite a sight: rosy-cheeked, wild haired, glasses clouded by vapor from my exertions, thoroughly damp from shouldering a path through snowy boughs, and numbly sodden from midthigh to bootsole after a tumble in a creek.

I can't remember the last time I felt so foolish and happy. So paralyzed by laughter.

"Not Only the Eskimos"

We have only one noun
but as many different kinds:

the grainy snow of the Puritans
and snow of soft, fat flakes,

guerrilla snow, which comes in the night
and changes the world by morning,

rabbinical snow, a permanent skullcap
on the highest mountains,

snow that blows in like the Lone Ranger,
riding hard from out of the West,

surreal snow in the Dakotas,
when you can't find your house, your street,
though you are not in a dream
or a science fiction movie,

snow that tastes good to the sun
when it licks black tree limbs,
leaving us only one white stripe,
a replica of a skunk,

unbelievable snows:
the blizzard that strikes on the tenth of April,
the false snow before Indian summer,
the Big Snow on Mozart's birthday,
when Chicago became the Elysian fields
and strangers spoke to each other,

paper snow, cut and taped
to the inside of grade-school windows,

in an old tale, the snow that covers a nest of strawberries,
small hearts, ripe and sweet,

the special snow that goes with Christmas,
whether it falls or not,

the Russian snow we remember
along with the warmth and smell of our furs,
though we have never treveled
to Russia or worn furs,

Villon's snows of yesteryear,
lost with ladies gone out like matches,
the snow in Joyce's "The Dead,"
the silent, secret snow
in a story by Conrad Aiken,
which is the snow of first love,

the snowfall between the child
and the spacewoman on TV,

snow as idea of whiteness,
as in snowdrop, snow goose, snowball bush,

the snow that puts stars in your hair,
and your hair, which has turned to snow,

the snow Elinor Wylie walked in
in velvet shoes,

the snow before her footprints
and the snow after,

the snow in the back of our heads,
whiter than white, which has to do
with childhood again each year.

[Lesil Mueller]

Last night Lookout Mountain became a Sherwood for goodwilled guerrilla snow. It crowned each of the pie pumpkins standing sentinel on my front porch with little rabbinical skullcaps (a deserved recognition of their fortitude), and put stars in my hair when I went out to the woods with Janie for an invigorated walk.

I've only come in for a cup of coffee and a moment's rapture before I return. Snows in Georgia never last long, and I intend to make the most of every flake.

"Suspended"

I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it
The "everlasting arms" my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.

[Denise Levertov]