Listening to snow

The snow is speaking to me, and I am not taking much time to listen. Yesterday when I was driving to town, I was fiddling around with the radio trying to find the FM stations, and my back ached as it does when my body is struggling to keep up with the momentum of my thoughts. And then, around me I noticed the light from the snow. I noticed the trees at the far edge of the white field, I was aware of a whole, rich song of awareness that was echoing and reverberating through everything around me. The snow had a voice, the trees had a voice, and there were many other voices, too, blended together to make something different and vast. It was a song that held wisdom, and it was a song that held me, whether or not I was aware of it at any given moment.

When I was a teenager and adult, I felt afraid when I heard this type of song because I thought it meant that I was crazy. Later, I feared that hearing these songs made me a poor Christian. I am not afraid of these songs any more. Instead, I want to hear them all the time. Nothing is more important or more beautiful than to join in an awareness of that reverberating wholeness, but instead, it, I irritably poke buttons on the radio and worry about being late. Over and over again I find that I am scrambling around on the floor gathering hard breadcrumbs, when above me stand tables laden with a feast.

The quality of the light from the snow reminds me of a light that I sometimes experience when I believe I am in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The light is a pressure that I feel on my forehead and my scalp. It speaks to me of awe so deep that it is trance-like. It speaks to me of a percussive rhythm that repeats over and over until, and if one rocks along to it, one can become suspended in light. It speaks of great distances. It speaks of the point in childbirth when the boundaries of mother’s skin become irrelevant, and her mouth drops open. It speaks of death, swaddled and accompanied, numbed as if with novicaine. This snow on the ground sings with a high shrill voice, with the wide open sound, and with a voice so deep that it has become like the tug of a magnet.