Freeze and Thaw

Water and ice

In the depths of winter, the height of the season, the weather often follows a rollercoaster cycle: freeze, thaw, and freeze again. The January thaw is a recognized meteorological phenomenon around here. This year we’ve had several thaws, with stretches of single-digit nights between them.

The climate here in the middle of the continent depends on the weaving of cycles thousands of miles away. Mild air from the Pacific rolls in regularly. Sometimes it brings rain or wet snow. It also traps Arctic air in the north, building up until it looms over Canada like a glacier. Outbreaks of polar cold come roaring down across the plains. Road crews and TV weather forecasters shift into high gear.

Moss and snow

After snow, the warming air melts the earth into mud. When the deep freeze starts again, dirt turns solid. Deer tracks are set in stone. With the next thaw, the soil becomes powdery earthbound dust. This is the pattern that transforms rock into topsoil, crack by tiny crack. Gaia recreates herself each winter, with each grain of earth.

I walk in the woods every chance I get. The rare 60-degree days are gifts from spring, but I walk farther on cloudy days that never get above 40. My world is transparent in winter. I can see through the trees to the road at the foot of the hill, a neighbor’s barn, the bright surface of a lake in the valley.

Hickory bud

Hickory and oak trees make gray buds. Red twigs brighten at the tips of dogwood trees. Black clusters form where seedpods attach to redbud branches. This year the first snowdrops bloomed on Twelfth Night. The woods are getting ready.

A Scottish legend says that the Goddess Brighid grows old and bent and gray as the rocky hills with the season. At the start of February she strikes a stone with her staff and releases a flowing spring. She drinks the living water and becomes young again, as lambs begin to be born and flowers spring from the ground.

In the next thaw, I will dig a little hard soil from my garden and put it in a pot. I will water it and set it beside my wood stove. As it warms with the year, we will move toward spring.

Snowdrops

Snow Labyrinth

The stones marking the paths of the labyrinth vanish under as little as two inches of snow. Trails I’ve laid down all year are gone as if they never existed. The landmarks I thought I knew throw me off course. Let’s see: if I stay to the left of the thornless locust, I should pass on which side of the entwined elms?

Rabbit, I think

The first tracks in the snow are usually rabbits. Two paws together, showing toes, are the bunnies. The deeper split print with a longer stride is probably a deer. None of them follow the paths I’ve laid out; our intentions are too different. They’re making a living in the cold. I’m wandering around in circles.

There’s an Irish legend about the straying sod, an innocent-looking spot where faeries have crossed the track. An unsuspecting traveler returning home from the pub late at night may be detoured into a bog when he steps there. This strikes me as a creative excuse that might not fly when the traveler finally staggers home.

Deer, probably

The labyrinth in winter is one large straying sod. It tricks me into breaking my patterns. It shows me other ways, decoying me deeper into the woods. Soon I’m up to my knees in buckbrush and greenbriar. Just beyond the thorns, though, another set of deer tracks leads me on down the hillside.

Definitely cat

Following tracks in snow is compelling. I keep expecting to stumble upon deep secrets, magic groves, mysteries. And even within a stone’s throw of the road, the mysteries appear: a young oak still wearing its golden leaves, cedars surrounding the sky pond, the path leading back to the house. I’ve come full circle, wandering like a rabbit, twisting through an uncharted labyrinth, turning like the year.

White Sky

Some days the clouds pile up thick as down comforters, deep as unfallen snow. The earth hushes beneath their weight; the wind rushes in whispers. Last night it rained, a real rain, for the first time in more than a month. Just after dawn the sky cleared, then clouded again — not storm clouds but a pale winter deepening, calling in the solstice.

William Stafford wrote about this sky:

“Many things in the world have


already happened. You can

go back and tell about them.

They are part of what we

own as we speed along

through the white sky.

“But many things in the world

haven't yet happened. You help

them by thinking and writing and acting.

Where they begin, you greet them

or stop them. You come along

and sustain the new things.”

         —William Stafford, In the White Sky

This is the weather of manifestation. Anything you can think of might be there behind the cloudbank, white against the trees. Close your eyes and look for it. Let regrets fade into the sky. Create your heart’s delight; choose a life that brings joy. 

We are all here, in this moment, in this sky.

Unfolding

At one point I had the idea that clearing and smoothing the walking trails through my woods would result in brisk exercise. That was before I caught myself stopping every few steps to look at something: seed pods on a redbud tree, gooseberry leaves turning scarlet, a cat following me, the view across the creek valley, a spider web, the sky.

Along the west side of the ridge, I often pause so long I seem to take root, like Tolkien’s Ent Treebeard:

“I can see and hear (and smell and feel) a great deal from this, from this, from this a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or-burúmë. Excuse me: that is a part of my name for it; I do not know what the word is in the outside languages: you know, the thing we are on, where I stand and look out on fine mornings, and think about the Sun, and the grass beyond the wood, and the horses, and the clouds, and the unfolding of the world.”

— Treebeard in The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

I don’t even want to close my eyes to meditate. The sounds of the woodlands overwhelm me. Blue jays set up a racket. Crows argue politics. Footsteps in the fallen leaves might be a cat or a deer or a wild turkey. The occasional car or truck labors uphill. A neighbor fires up the chainsaw. The wind swishes across the valley before it begins to move the trees on the ridge. I have to look.

One of my favorite cards in Morgan’s Tarot is “The Universe: Not unfolding the way it should.” The Zen joke, of course, is that the Universe can only unfold exactly the way it should.

Leaves cover the paths. Branches outline the sky. In a few months the trees will bud again. Geese call above the clouds, heading south, this time. The seasons and cycles turn. I pause on the hillside and look across the creek valley to watch the slow unfolding of the world.