Quiet

It's been cold, and snowing, and cold and snowing, and my blogging has gone the way of the cold and snowing.... becoming a bit blank and fuzzy. Eh, I think. I'll write tomorrow. Not unlike my attempts to go to the Y, though with my pretty new rockstar shuffle, that might be changing. In the midst of the cold and the snow, I've seen old friends, connected with a mentor, rejoiced over the birth of a new baby (not mine, not pregnant, not desirous of becoming so, just for the record), had a moment of clarity about change and transition -- I've had a lot of it, recently -- truly a moment of shock at the obvious, read something about hearing criticism about ones art that I was able to apply directly to my life in ministry -- after all, isn't what we do in the church all about art and nuance and creativity and perspective and as we move through life we can only control our actions, and not someone else's reaction to it -- positive or negative. Yeah, it was a good reminder for me, too.

Just as I looked out the window at the falling snow and felt a sense of quiet within (clearly I didn't need to leave the house at that moment, or my delight would have been short), as I tip-tapped across the well-shoveled crunchiness the next morning, there was a return of a grind. That's really far too dramatic for the situation, but I noticed the snow crunching and noticed the incongruity of my sleek high heels next to the startling white of the snow and discovered that some things in life seem silly and as if they don't go together and somehow it works. It just works. And other times we wear the most practical thing for the weather and still end up on crutches for 10 days in January (college experience, it wasn't the initial fall that hurt so much as the subsequent attempts at walking across an icy campus on crutches).

They might not make sense, these words on this page, even to me, but they are there. And that's a start again.