Prayers pulled from a winter's walk

January 26, 2015

Walked Lynn out to her car this morning. On my way back the sun crested the forest’s horizon throwing long shadows north-west across the road at the river’s bend. Golden light shone in the white pines and snowy stretches as if it was radiating from within their branches and banks.

Yesterday mid-afternoon I walked up to the hill’s crest above the cabin. The same long shadows, reaching north-east this time, cut the snow field into swaths of white blanketing snow. The grey shadows striped the already sleeping snow reaching for the evening’s dark dreaming. But in the sun - a frozen crust of crystals were awake with colour.  Yellow, green, blue, red, silver and all shades between danced in celebration of this moment’s eternal joy.

I listened

the occasional bird song carried across the stillness

accompanied by sighing gentle winds in the branches as if responding in turn

I am wordless in prayer

my deep breathing matching footsteps chanting a path thru snow

with the other creatures’ ways and walks

squirrel tracks skitter only as deep as the last snow fall

coyote tracks criss-crossing in hunt of mice beneath the crust their tracks land on

deep deer - and even deeper moose trails – as deep as mine but with an eco-footprint much smaller, spread further apart and purposed on survival

while my big deep wide tromp tromp tromping tracks tell of a plodding hiker hunting only for god’s whisper in these mid-winter woods

I listen

slip sliding down to where two rivers join

to be mesmerized by black water’s urgent noiseless rust-yellow brimming

before falling to drum a thunder roll’s roar without end

and along the banks sparkling water’s bright gurgling rush

sings a melody in a language unwritten and unreasoned 

but still it tells a story – it pulls my story

from my broken open heart – pouring black fears over a timeless granite shelf to drum against in fury and lift just a spray of spirit’s hope

amidst the broiling wash - my wasted attempts at control

ideas spilling from chaotic head too full of indecipherable directions – too many – too jumbled to provide a sense of path except the inevitable falling pull of time’s current

and so are prayers pulled from within me

prayers I didn’t know how to say

questions I didn’t know how to ask

emotions I didn’t know how to feel

the earth, the wind, the water express

with only the sun to see

until I’m empty

until I’m lost and alone

until death and life meet

and finding rest

stilled,

soaking in the strong last rays of a winter’s sun’s calling

can begin to find my way to hearth and home again

mid-day, mid-winter, mid-life

where death meets life and makes room

for a moment like this