Imagine a world whose permanent weather is the chilly wet gray of this week. Imagine waking every day to this bone-deep blankness to the eye that yearns for sun--yes, even the splintered, unbearable silver sun of December-- and color.
Winter always outstays its welcome, and it doesn't go gently into spring, though its cold rains presage and prepare for it. Cold comfort, that, is what we feel in our impatience to be warm. Winter makes us work right to the end. It does not relent, does not retract its claws until a much large force, the turning of the Great Wheel, exerts its inevitable power. This is the source of the poet's ringing optimism, when he cried out,
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy!
O Wind, If Winter comes,
can Spring be far behind?
But it's the ordinary that tests our resolve, our nerve, our imagination--that discovers the strength of our will, the real heroism of our lives. It's not the looking-away but the looking-into to discover, tame, and learn from the self that
is our work, the archeology of our lives.
Winter always outstays its welcome, and it doesn't go gently into spring, though its cold rains presage and prepare for it. Cold comfort, that, is what we feel in our impatience to be warm. Winter makes us work right to the end. It does not relent, does not retract its claws until a much large force, the turning of the Great Wheel, exerts its inevitable power. This is the source of the poet's ringing optimism, when he cried out,
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy!
O Wind, If Winter comes,
can Spring be far behind?
But it's the ordinary that tests our resolve, our nerve, our imagination--that discovers the strength of our will, the real heroism of our lives. It's not the looking-away but the looking-into to discover, tame, and learn from the self that
is our work, the archeology of our lives.
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