Grey Winter Day

Sunless winter days are seldom thought of as beautiful. They more typically feel dreary, and evoke a longing for spring, or at least a blue sky and sunshine. Yet the grey days have their own aesthetic distinctions. Trees laid bare offer their shapes and forms without foliage, and what you see there depends on the quality of attention you bring to the moment--your ability to see the thingness of what you gaze on.

The oak above spreads widely, its crown uncommonly broad. Its branches are loaded with galls, ball-like formations common to oaks. The limbs are large and strong. Below, a row of graceful cypress trees stands by a pond, their younger and more vertical crowns offering another natural architecture to the observer.

Some wintertime trees make you wonder where the shapes came from. Those in the image below look windswept, and one can almost imagine the two of them being swept in different directions. Still, the trunks and branches bend in a way that to me feels and appears agile, harmonious. They could be dancers, holding their arrays of fanlike twigs at the end of their limbs. But in fact they are trees, and I appreciate them most for their tree-natures.

A few clumps of broomsedge, which move from green in summer to gold and orange in fall and winter, stand in the foreground of the photo below. They gain a kind of prominence against the less-colorful though serene background. (They look good against a blue sky, too, especially when whole fields of them are on display.) But they only get their standout color in contrast to what's around them when most of the green things are dormant.

When I left the house, moving out into the day at first seemed chilly and damp, cheerless and somber. After I'd been walking for a while, I found myself more and more interested in what was there, and discovered I'd become more present, more part of the place I moved through. The walking warmed me, as it always does. Looking at what was actually there, wanting to see the place as it distinctively was at that moment, focused my seeing, my attention, on what was in fact there, rather than on some "ideal" day I might have wished for. I often sense that wishing for ideal forms (sorry, Plato) is not only futile, but a failure to draw the blessedness from an already-offered abundance.

It was a good day, and a good walk.

Fast-Moving Clouds

I watch the sky's appearance change from moment to moment. It's late January, southeastern United States, the kind of windy day that keeps gathering clouds in continuous motion. It's not one of those times when you can study clouds long enough to imagine they look like something that matches something else, where one billowy cumulus looks like a reclining woman, propped on an elbow, and another looks like a unicorn.

These clouds are dark and thick, with a lot of water in them. They almost cover the sun, yet the sun is insistent, illuminating a spot behind the flow of vapor in the stream of clouds.

So the sky isn't all black. The sun penetrates, and colors different shades where the cloud thicker or thinner, adding texture along with changing hues and brightness.

A small patch of blue shines briefly in the photo above, allowing the light to offer a barely visible but discernible rainbow in the top of the image.

In the picture above, even more than the others, the clouds appear as a tunnel. All clouds like these, dense, and near-bursting with the rain they're about to release, have moments of vivid three-dimensionality.

You can imagine a journey through the nebulous passage leading to a brilliant light at the other end, where the cold sky shines blue in thinning air.

Instincts

This morning, I followed my dog outside in a light rain. While he explored with his nose, I looked around, and noticed something no less lovely for being a common sight in times of winter rain--drops of water holding together and hanging from the bare twigs of small trees.

Thanks to my dog Marlowe, I followed his curious, exploratory instinct, and got one of my own instincts--the one for opening my eyes, for seeing what's all around--awakened. It's so easy for the clamorous world to shout down the natural affinity for immemorial beauty.

I stood still, watching Marlowe walk an erratic pattern following his nose. Then I looked around, and noticed the water drops formed on the trees. I thought of how many times I've stood in the same spot with nothing in my surroundings ever looking quite the same. Yet in stillness and quiet, with a focus like these drops of water, I can, for a while, lose awareness of time.

First Snow

Our mentioning of the weather--our perfunctory observations on what kind of day it is, are perhaps not idle. Perhaps we have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, to know how the sky is grey, paler in the south, with patches of blue in the southwest, with snow on the ground, the thermometer at 18, and cold wind making your ears ache. I have a real need to know these things because I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place, and a day in which I have not shared truly in all this is no day at all. It is certainly part of my life of prayer. 
--Thomas Merton, from When the Trees Say Nothing, ed. Kathleen Deignan (from journals)



The first snow sits lightly today on a variety of surfaces. A white day on the ground, a sky that looks almost white, though it's grey, too. Where is the boundary between light grey and white?

What divides the water that flows in streams from water that's momentarily captured in the crystalline flakes of snow? The still snow on the banks, after all, will soon be liquid, visibly flowing down the stream.

Snow rests in neatly rounded heaps on the small leaves of an azalea bush. It's the form offered for this day.

But the weather here will be warmer tomorrow, and the sun will shine almost all day. Snow is noticeably transient in these latitudes. So the neatly shaped mini-mounds of snow on the leaves of the bush will melt away with the snow on the banks of streams, and the streams will carry the meltwater away.

The ephemeral snow draws my attention more than it would if it stayed longer. Its novelty captures the attention. Yet I know too, that to see it, and see it well enough to know it, demands that I stop and watch for what it has to show that I haven't seen before, some nuance about the way something about a known place has shifted.

The oft-repeated observation that no two snowflakes are alike interests us because snow is always seen as a kind of collective. Even when it's coming down it's a snowfall. Snow holds together as long as conditions permit, a kind of inertia. When the temperature changes, the wind blows, or creatures walk through it, the flakes are dispersed, or they change form, or they're compacted. Newly fallen in freezing weather, they stay where they are, whether mostly horizontal, as on the ground, or vertical, as on the tree-trunks.

The snow-look of trees pleases the eye. Early on, a snowfall lies on almost all surfaces, whether horizontal or vertical. So we sometimes say snow sticks when it accumulates, and when it simply falls in small amounts and melts away, it doesn't stick.

Snow gets our attention, especially where it doesn't fall very often. So I go out and look at it, sometimes with a camera. As Merton says, "I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place . . ." The events of the atmosphere are another aid to knowing and appreciating the place I'm part of. What the atmosphere does shows up on the ground.

Late Autumn Reflections

In autumn countless branches and leaves
retreat into the sea of Death--
in the garden the crow clothed in black like a mourner
laments over the withered green.
Then again from the Lord of the land
comes the command to Non-existence . . .

Brother, sister, collect your wits and consider:
moment by moment, continually,
there is autumn and spring within you.
Behold the garden of the heart,
green and moist and fresh . . .
--Rumi (tr. Kabir and Camille Helminski)


The trees around me are mostly dormant now, taking a break from making all that food for themselves with the help of the sun. I feel dormant today, too, as I do in times when my natural inclinations follow the flow of the natural world and tell me to be still, sit quietly with myself, or just watch.

I was outside watching when I noticed, in deeper pools of a shallow creek, reflections of the bare tree limbs above. In these images the oak leaves that have fallen lie in random patterns around and just below the surface of the water. The leaves, not long ago, flourished on the trees above. Now the brown, fallen foliage will begin to decompose and build soil that will continue to nurture the trees that bore them, and later on, new trees.

The images change as I move from one place to another, and the light changes, and what I see changes.

Large changes have passed through the ground of my own life this year. I retired in the spring. Then, one daughter passed through a divorce. Another daughter gave birth to a new granddaughter.  After years of suffering the effects of a terrible stroke 11 years earlier, my mother died. Life is always moving, elements falling away, impulses rebuilding. Moments may look stable to us, but give them time, and the illusion of constancy dissolves.

In the photos, the trees are reflections, and the leaves are solid objects, though they're both part of the same pattern. And the leaves can look more or less substantial--the ones underneath the surface of the water are  ghostly, the ones above, sometimes softly focused.

A close look at the image just above shows a bit of gravel across the top, rocks of the earth agitated for ages over the creek bed, first cracked apart, then smoothed by long years of being tossed in the motion in the water. Processes appear in layers, and within the layers themselves.

Movement goes on, even at winter's door. Under the water, in the air, in the way everything looks and feels. Spring will be back. Now the earth says, notice the silence, and the stillness. Slow your own rhythm, let the stillness in.