Winter wonderland...yeah, right!

It has been a winter season of a different sort this year. Every weekend it seems, we have a storm of some kind... snow, ice, rain... and now we have snow coming at the first of this week. I know folks think the mountains always have snow but in actuality, our snows have been few and far between in the past ten years. Even when our weather patterns were relatively normal, snowstorms were followed by a week or two of sunny cold weather, not endless days of gray light punctuated by bursts of precipitation. The wear and tear of dealing with this winter weather is showing up in people and animals alike.
When I went to the stable this morning, Junie B met me with her ears laid back, no pretense of civility at all. Kate and Shirley, the donkeys, came out snarling and kicking at each other, quarreling over who got to stand where at the hay net. Dixie roared out in full gallop mode striking out over the muddy hill slipping and sliding her way through the pasture. Bud the Barn Cat was the only animal (and that includes me) who seemed to have a decent disposition this morning.
The cow barn is awash in hock deep mud and manure. The mule, in four wheel drive with all the power at its disposal, nearly got stuck in red clay mud when I tried to take hay to the outdoor manger. We can’t take them to the back pasture because the road to it is impassable and we would be unable to feed them there. The trees felled by the first snowstorm just before Christmas, lie along side our road waiting for drier weather so they can be cleaned up. There was a major rock and mud slide on the road we take to get to Weaverville, our little town close by. I drove by thirty minutes before the slide on my way home from teaching. On the farm, we do not have sewers to carry away our excess rain. The streams rise and overflow the bridge. Mud becomes a fact of life and good muck boots are more than a fashion accessory.
None of this is life threatening or irreversible. It is a pain in the neck ( and other regions of our anatomy) that leaves us feeling truly under the weather. Michael was bold enough to suggest this was a spiritual discipline, an opportunity to practice patience. He was almost mauled by those of us who are teetering on the edge of sanity. And yet...
Daddy often said snow was poor man’s fertilizer, nitrogen rich. Our hay fields, assuming they don’t slide off the top of the hills, will be the better for all this snow. In June and July when we are sweltering while putting up hay, I will remember these seemingly endless days of ice, rain and snow and give thanks for the passing of the seasons, each with its own spiritual gifts to give.
“The bliss of the animals lies in this, that on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those-few at any moment on the earth- who do not ‘look before and after and pine for what is not’ but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now.” George Macdonald There are the words I need, the prayer I can pray, during these winter days and nights. Help me, Father, to live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now. Give me grace enough for clear eyed vision so that I may see the gifts of winter and live without pining for what is not. And when summer heat does come, may I still be living with a thankful heart for all the gifts I have been given in this wonderfully messy untidy world of such heartbreaking beauty. Amen.

Liminal Living

I woke up in the night, my pillow wet with tears shed in my dream. And in that liminal moment between sleep and waking, I felt the shift of time between the unseen river that runs through my unconscious and the exposed everyday self seen and known by others. Liminal moments, the small slice of time between shifts in time is a holy sacred often unacknowledged sacrament. When one something stops and another something begins... the moment between a baby’s birth and its first crying breath, dreaming to waking, life to death, the moment your youngest child leaves home, the sliver of time between the last sight of the setting sun and dusk, the shift in the liturgical seasons, the moment you step outside your front door after a hard winter and smell the damp warm breath of spring... is a call to lay down your cares for a moment and be present to the Holy One who lives there.
Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,-
The rest sit around and pick blackberries.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Keep me from just picking blackberries today, Lord. Help me see the burning bushes, feel when your presence sets my soul afire, know your sustaining loving care as I live the liminal moments of this day. Amen.

Thanks to Lake Shore Baptist Church and their online newsletter that never fails to provide light for the journey... and to Jim Nogalski, a member of Lake Shore, whose program of original music entitled Liminal Light set me to thinking