a mirror of coldness.

Last week was cold, so cold. So empty, so barren, so devoid with everything inessential. So insensate, so unresponsive. Silent, but not solemnly so. A silence that haunts the heart with fragile emptiness. A humility breathed in with every gale of arctic air, in search of a vulnerable plea of guidance. Last week was all of this, and none of it, at the same time.

Despite the boreal gusts, I choose to leave home in the early morning, my lungs almost cast in fractals of ice. My hands turn frigid, even in my pockets, but I still go. I face the seasons of life and watch it all mirror within me with a painful emptiness that is severely worrying. I watch the dawn unfold with rosy and lilac tints, the full moon in its fall, the blackbird soulfully singing its song. And I see the little dandelion petals asleep, arms clasped facing the stars. Venus adorns the eastern horizon with a spectacular glow. Clovers multiply in the shadows of the barren silk floss trees beneath a bed of autumn leaves. All is alive and all is dead, all the same.

This season is beautiful, and it lies on a canvas of love. This winter is the precipice of an approaching warmth, and nothing is as it seems. The goodness of sharing still prevails, it still is, in the most silent state of its beingness. This death is expectant and patient and ever so existent, and not necessarily apparent.

I see this and know that the abyss in my heart this morning is but something silently profound, an opportunity to receive God’s grace in effortless flows; to receive the blackbird song, the full moon’s glow and the beginning of life so honest and slow.

And this season is all enmeshed and entangled into the other. It is all one and the same. And for this, I am safe.