…is something. That’s for sure. Can’t say I love it, although I did give it a shot as best I could. I think I made it all the way through the first BIG storm, embracing the grand excuse to stay home and tucked in and cozy. And although I’d like to say that more than a week has passed since then, it hasn’t. It’s been seven days exactly, and I’m ready for something different. I have a terrible attention span when it comes to winter.

It’s mostly the cold, really–and the ice, if I’m getting right down to it. I hate being cold. And I hate the threat of slipping on ice, especially with a little one in my arms (or a growing belly containing precious cargo, as was the case last year). The snow, itself, I’m beginning to embrace. It falls so perfectly and quietly out the window, and before the world gets to it, it’s crisp and pure and without blemish. The perfect metaphor for anything with new life in it.

I know that without the winter, we would likely appreciate other seasons less: the warmth of the summer sun, the vibrance of colors in autumn, life being breathed back into the landscape in the spring. For a long time I’ve considered winter to be sort of grayish and sad–always coming on strongest after the holidays and bringing with it a cloudiness that covers everything, makes the days feel dim. But there’s a perfect stillness about things in wintertime that doesn’t happen in any other part of the year. It’s quiet. Introspective. Reserved, in a way. We all huddle in, bringing comforts closer and nestling into home and family in a different way than we’re prone to in warmer weather.

And then there’s the snow. Some years it comes on like a bear, and others, so subtly you almost miss it for a while. When it gets here, it seems as if to say, “It’s time. Settle down your life for a moment…there will be plenty of days ahead for you to fill to their brim with busyness.” Maybe I notice it more this year because I’m spending less time rushing around and more time tucked inside–staying busy, but in an entirely different way. Or maybe I’m taking note because I’m getting older, and I’m tired of loathing the winter months…desiring to make the most of what’s in front of me as it comes.

I have a harder and harder time taking things for granted these days, and for the most part, I’m grateful. The result is twofold as I see it:

1) I have to try harder to ban worry from my days, for risk of pondering too many what ifs and irrational fears that detract from the life that God is giving me each moment.

and

2) I appreciate things and people and slivers of time so much more than I once did, and my joy is drawn from the small things just as much as it is the big ones, which I love.

There is an inner peace that comes with accepting the seasons we’re in, while we’re in them. Even when the snow is falling, when the wind is whipping, when the chill in the air seems biting and without relent. And even when the world is swirling in a way that we can’t see clearly what’s in front of us, but we trust that there is something, and that it is good. It is in that moment of trusting–in our willingness to make peace with where we are, that we say yes to moving along.

admiring snowflakes in the streetlight glow tonight,

mm