Winter Fade
Photoscribbles
Winter is the season of the soul. The up to the knees action of the blizzard depths so indulging adventurous in the bone frame of every shivering saint – winter is the most beautiful season in the human soul.
Maybe a Midwest take from a booted lungful of healing cracked open cold and stunning fresh winter air. Let it hide, yes hibernate, slumber, and blanket repressed and cozy anger. Winter is the simulation of death. The silences of long pages writing, building, piling, sleeping and thinking. Thinking without rushing and calling my unconscious out to play.
I believe the people I’ve crept up akin to and adoring are those most friendly with their unconscious, their art, their outbursts, their opened doors of perception. The type A denial soldiers have frightened us with their certainty and relentless doing, while from the tree hole in fogged up warmth and featherdown, I peek – my dark pilling eyes, and see them loot, destroy, avenge and suffer. Last year the snow was missing and the word the locals use is “devastating.”
I worry, but the familiar stomach pot stew gives way now to the trapdoor reflex God cultivated in my winter and every season soul. The trapdoor is prayer. Turn the pink rising sky to prayer and lift those dark spilling eyes to the sky changing dawn that every day lights the snow and skeleton trees.
Close the dark eyes and see clearly, the crossroads, the cross standing, the cross your heart and hope to die. Winter is the soul’s nourished pink cheeked hale and pretty thing Midwest grumblers are used to, but the inside wilderness is fires burning and evolving, refining the shape of us, refining the shape of sight—and spring will arrive. Every season does.
In the climate disaster, change may kill, maim, alter or otherwise, but this is not my worry in the 7 degree depths of the tundra suburbs. The impacted sidewalks and salt on my coat sleeve, back from the Northwoods where winter is simply perfect.
When the weather breaks with the warmer spring scent and the groundhog does his shadow work, I will emerge, but for winters I've slumbered and grown overnights ladled with subconscious stars rewiring the night, making repairs and magic surgery, kisses of angels of mercy and warmth. Blankets piled and a stripped down togetherness by unmarked snow piles.
My God is in winter and he enters my soul there at my song of songs doorway. I chase him, I eat him, I breathe him and more than being loved, I want to show love. I want to envelope the world's woes with the sacred heart united in mine before the birds sing, but lo - today this morning fog.
I hear the bird chirp and sing. Is this the spring arrival already? Is this the end of my waking back to sleep rolling yawning hibernation? A surprise mating call from my lover and Lord - interchangeable naming for the one I surrender all to. Please take all I am and please show me the path steps of naked wonder. How to love and be loved as you say, God's decree. The people cry for a king, but the king is within.
