Solitude and still, STILL, falling snow

It is so very quiet in the Pend Oreille north country these days. Even the hunters have silenced their locked and loaded weapons for the season. The one constant is the snow. A factor Kevin hates. Yet seasons do not run for a popularity crown and so the snow has already been a regular presence here for the last month. The forecasts are worthless, with surprise squalls and no shows. The ground is a carpet of shocking variations in white.

Yet looking through the wood’s, one discovers a less than consistent ground cover. The views through my frosted windows hint that frozen precipitation has been irregular in its dispatch from the shaded to exposed terrain. Our snowfall tallies are the definition of hit and miss. We’ve had dumps of 3 feet, followed by a Chinook melt down, then followed most reliably by daily flurries and spits of powder. The wind comes up the valley and moves things around as the deer and elk and moose track each day’s sum total through the woods. Meanwhile a bewildered Kevin stands out on the deck, nervously smoking, watching the horizon, worrying about today’s road conditions.

Kevin originates from Tucson. He does not share my wonder of all things white out, the exhilaration of cold, nor is he inclined to celebrate these seemingly endless days of 19 hours of darkness. I can see his point and I’ve had to apologize for my insensitivity.

For some reason, known only to our county road crew, Le Clerc Road is a nightmare this winter. Bearing a constant presence of ice, each day presents a navigational challenge. Sometimes grooved, sometimes glassy, the ice lays always in wait. Standing at the ready, the treacherous hard pack is more than willing to spark and delight any last sense of hibernating adrenaline. Regardless of its texture, even seasoned road warriors are finding this year’s ice slick. Already the guardrails are autographed. The frantic skid marks tattle-taling encounters with ditches, trees, and frozen ponds. These graceful arcs, broad swooshed sashays and abrupt tire signatures also mark the beginnings of several bad days. So far none of these signatures have been ours. But winter is far from over.

Kevin is not without cause to worry. He met the ditch last year, was on the news once with his car facing the wrong way on Highway 2, and he had at least one ride in a tow truck. This year, despite better four wheel drive transportation, he is already a man long in waiting, as he visualizes the return of the land of midnight June.

Regardless of the treachery of a northern winter, I find that here remains a place of distilled magic and restless wonder. I remain in love with this place, the people, the wildlife, and yes, even the mysterious happenstance of each season’s character. Not that I love being a long standing member of ditch riders anonymous, but this too is part of the tradeoff that comes from living in the Northwest Rockies. Of any place in the U.S., the Pend Oreille Valley is one of the most regular carriers of the rare White Christmas Virus, and certainly a decade worth of photographs on www.highmountainranch.com makes that point.

Still, I really struggle with the Christmas season. Anyone who has read my Christmas stories http://www.highmountainranch.com/christmaslinks.html would understand that I am caught perpetually standing at the forefront of this bizarre intersection of holiday wonder and wanderlust. Equal parts haunting, astonishment, fear, joy, coupled with numerous competing memories, these are all themes that confront my current interpretation of each years helping of yuletide.

This year my Christmas list is short. I’ve managed to already find all of the 2007 Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars. I try to share my bounty with my neice Kelcy, despite her mother’s hints that Webkins and Pretty Pretty Princess Party favors are far preferable to Uncle Tim’s Tom Boy injections. Indeed I am already 7 vehicles into the 2008 collection. Kelcy is not far behind. I have a few HO scale building I’d like to acquire for the next version of Timmyville-but I lack room to store the buildings I’ve already constructed, so those future structures are on the long wait list of my short list of needs. On the other hand Kelcy has many needs. The most pressing being that she has no electric train set. An omission that should be weighted quite heavily with a tentative word: “yet”.

Kevin and I have decorated the exterior of the house, as well as the interior. The Christmas Tree is now finally standing. Or not. These things have a habit of falling around here-usually in the middle of the night. Outside I’ve roped led light strings up to the top of several trees, stung garland around log rails, and dashed inside to warm every freezing bone in my body before plugging it all in.

But as I write this in solitude, and as the snow is lightly dancing from God’s hand, I must confess that the magic of these moments has been a bit scattered this season. I know that with time, I have become skeptical and withdrawn, and as winter is bound to encourage, I’ve felt myself drawing tight and closing in the walls I’ve so carefully constructed to ward off the assault of the season. It is very easy to embrace pessimism, exhaustion, and launch into a state of no more shopping days left until a breakdown. Why not just survive the holidays in survival mode?

I sat down this morning realizing that I simply am not with the program this year. I picked up a gentle devotional sent my way by Trinity College. Each day, the idea is that Trinity will gently send this spiritual gift your way, you will acquiesce just because you have it lying on the kitchen table and that somehow, you read one passage throughout that season better known as Advent. These people are evil in their kindness.

In case you don’t know, Advent, to most Christians is the season of anticipation and in anticipating Christmas I should have been reading this devotional for a couple weeks now. But instead until today, I’ve anticipated rebelliously not reading it. I’ve had this sort of “They can send it but that doesn’t mean I’ll read it” attitude. This year I’ve proudly done everything I could to avoid anything that felt remotely spiritual.

So yeah I confess it’s only the 17th of December and I am just now reading day one and only because I’ve already read the latest issue of Cowboys and Indians so many times I have it memorized. I only picked up the Advent Devotional because there is nothing left in the house to read while eating breakfast.

Trinity must know there are thousands of hopeless people like me on their mailing list-People that have nothing to read while eating their Nature Valley Granola. So they brilliantly send out these little essays. They know we all have Christmas Season Attention Deficit Disorder. CSADD. They know that the day’s helping is designed to be compact enough that one can read through a short page each day, getting through the message long before the granola in the cereal bowl disappears and dawn rises over the mountain. Ideally that’s how it’s supposed to work. The folks at Trinity are very smart people.

So today, the first essay I read was written by the Rev Dan Erlander. He based it on Roman’s 13:11, written by the Apostle Paul, who I admit I always have big problems with. But today I was in a rare, open-minded, frame of mind, so despite the biblical reference and the author, I kept reading. This is a miracle in itself. I consider the Apostle Paul to be the Shirley Maclaine of the New Testament-a sort of finding Christ through mysticism character and a harsh on gays wanna-be disciple.

I won’t directly quote the scripture of Roman’s 13:11 because I am not really in the mood for some Biblical based copyright lawsuit, but the gist of Paul’s words astounded me. Basically the words go like this: “Understand the presentness of this time, get your ass up now because the magic hour of salvation is nearer than you think.”

It’s winter. Christmas is still days away. The annual celebration of the birth of Jesus is so not here yet. The last thing most of us feel like doing is getting out of the warmth of our beds. Who wants to interrupt a tropical, summer dream? One that comes complete with down comforter induced comfort, and safety under the covers, for the uncertainty that comes with any attempt at motion in Winter?

Yet as I continued to read, Erlander explored the theme of Paul’s passage and managed to hit upon a concept that really meant something to me. Spaciousness.

As in spaciousness of heart. Spaciousness of belief. Spaciousness of generosity. Spaciousness with regards to the gift of life. And the spaciousness of second chances.

In other words he covered an abbreviation of possibility thinking.

My friend Betty has been demonstrating this to me throughout this season. I met Betty in August and we became instant friends. We were born 24 hours apart. As in literally, 24 hours apart. She is my twin sister. We are both the paradox that is Aquarius. She was born in the warmth of a southern climate, while I was born in the midst of a snowstorm in Minnesota. Still, we share coming into the world within the same 24 hour time frame. She says I have aged better than her, but that’s only because my heart is not all that visible, so I would disagree.

Both of us have spent time in places that under the best of circumstance would be labeled as challenging. Yet I have never met someone who has as much spaciousness in her heart. It comes through in her work, in the raising of her child, and in the passions that define her path through the complexities of faith. Betty is a woman who embraces possibility.

But she is not alone in demonstrating the idea of spaciousness of heart. I have so many examples of spaciousness that surround me. As I read that passage this morning, I couldn’t help but be convicted by the amount of spaciousness I’ve witnessed during this year.

I thought of my friends Brett and Misty, who always feed me and tolerate my political passions. My friends Teddy and JoAnn, who gift spacious hospitality and who regale me with tales of the woods, rodeo and survival, always told against uncertain odds. My friend Mylinda who let warmly made me part of family for fireworks-proving to me that some families must have an entire army of guardian angels at their disposal. Despite our best efforts that night, the whole town of Newport did not burn down.

I think of my friends Gail and Lyle, who have on countless occasions shared their home with me and who let me go crazy photographing sunsets and river reflections and their dog. I think of my friend Lane who shared his home, his camping trailer, and his beloved circus dog with us even though our cooking was really scary, we were lazy at cleaning and nearly caught his home on fire with a renegade barbeque grill.

I also think of my team at work, and when I think of these are people, I see dedicated folks who stand always at the ready, eager to comfort thousands of people in the midst of their hours of need. They are spacious in their patience, empathy and willingness to go the extra mile for accident victims, the injured, and those who are suddenly homeless.

How convicting one word can be, this word spacious. Even as I have seen so many examples of spaciousness, I admit that I have become increasingly withdrawn, less charitable and solitaire. I can offer many explanations for the reasons why I’ve retreated, but none would really suffice. In reading that passage in Romans it is difficult to reconcile this battle with winter and the resistance in my heart with the brightness that should be extending into every arena of my life, regardless of the season.

I need to get my ass in gear. And if I remember right spacious living is often found in the most unexpected of places. There really wasn’t much room at that inn over 2000 years ago. Yet it was precisely in a lowly stable were spaciousness reigned.

It should be a no brainer-this leaning about the possibility of heart stuff. To have as one’s highest tenant a divinely inspired aim; to be spacious in life, love, and faith is the best possibility involved in waking up each morning. Although such a commitment goes against human nature, how the world becomes so much brighter when we are accommodating and generous, forgiving and loving. If we hope to rekindle a relationship with the miracle of what occurred in Bethlehem, than maybe such a journey is also our mandate towards healing ourselves.

A healing that starts when despite our brokenness, our pride, and our tendency toward protective self preservation, we take a chance. We embrace promise. And it’s just one promise really-A commitment that we unconditionally extend toward one another a spacious heart. A pledge that even while in the midst of life’s adversity and pain, that we reserve the most tenacious spaciousness toward others. A pledge that we make regardless of which season we are attempting to survive.