Hello There!
(Admit it, you read this in Ewan McGregor’s voice as Obi Wan Kenobi)
Well friends, the sun is shining, the snow is gone, the trees are FINALLY starting to bud, and I’m almost over the head cold from hell (not Covid, if you were wondering, just the general run of the mill, feel like crap head cold). In short, it’s finally spring. I’ve always found it a little strange that our new year starts in the height of winter, because for me, spring is the season of new beginnings. Maybe it’s growing up in this brutally cold corner of the world, but when the sun comes out in April and the daffodils finally burst forth from the soil, everyone I know lets out a collective sigh of relief (except for that one friend who lives to ski, I guess). We’re inspired to clean out our garages, eat a salad, and even putting away our laundry feels easier and more inspiring. Just as spring breathes new life into the forests and fields of the North Country, it awakens something in me, something that lay dormant as the weeks of 0 degrees and below wore slowly on. It’s hope.
Winter has its charms, and the first few weeks of brutal cold provided a kind of unique, distilled beauty. But I became somewhat disenchanted with the beauty of the North Country winter right about the time the pipes in my parents house (which we’d been watching for them as they got settled in Dallas, Texas) froze. Cue MAJOR headache. That month I also was diagnosed with atypical PCOS, such that my doctor isn’t too concerned that it is preventing fertility, but it’s something she wants to check on this summer if nothing changes. A few weeks later, both Austin and I lost our maternal grandmothers, first mine and then his. In a level of tragic that borders on the comical, their funerals were on the same day. Finding a church community provided an unexpected challenge with the departure of my father from my lifelong parish for Texas (the strange perspectives of being a PK in this situation demands the space of a blog all to its own). Between all this and more, suffice it to say as winter raged on in the North, the winter in our lives raged on too. And then, as Easter came and the winter ebbed away, so did the one in my head.
That all said, winter is a space for dreaming. It gives me a chance to reflect on the year passed and the one barely begun, providing space to dream of adventures and consider what changes I want to make in my life. Even if I could use perhaps a smidge less time dedicated to introspection, I’ll admit, it is a blessing. The cold crucible of winter reminds me of the absurd power of dreams and faith. For those readers who live in the North Country, you know what I mean when I say that looking out a high of 2 degrees on a January and still believing that days of sandals and sundresses will come once more is absurd. Yet, we have faith, and every year the snow melts and every year the earth warms. So we continue to dream. And then comes the spring, and some dreams come true.
Last Sunday I sat on a couch, bathed in sunlight, in the home of a couple who’d been attending my father’s parish until his departure. Like Austin and me, they, and the others in the group, yearned for a space to be nourished by the kind of in-depth biblical teaching that also could weigh the nuances of the world around us, sit in paradox, and provide authenticity — resulting in a sort of church homelessness. In that moment, as the warmth of the spring sun stroked my face, one person in the group shared how God can act even when we don’t know how to. He reminded me that God knows the hopes, the prayers, the dreams that live in our hearts. I realized that sitting in this group of people, sharing our struggles and hopes was an answer to one of my dreams. It got me thinking about all the other dreams in my life that I’m seeing appear before my eyes. My midwinter wanderlust has turned into a trip to Iceland with my grad school besties and my brother, and a month later a family trip to visit my brother in St. John’s, Newfoundland. We still struggle to achieve a successful pregnancy, but the devastating grip of that absence has loosened enough to continue to put our faith in our dream of a child. The ability to run the riverside trail in the mornings again, hosting a successful bookswap, letters from friends, and a kitchen full of fresh flowers — these are all realized dreams. So many other dreams, little and large, I’m seeing turn into realities, like bare trees becoming green.
I started out this post thinking I would write about my thoughts around how I want to use this blog moving forward, but as I wrote, it became something so much deeper. It became an ode to the marriage of winter and spring, a testimony of the power of dreaming in the cold and hoping in the warmth. Do we need winters in order to have the space to dream, to see those dream actualized in the spring? Maybe, no one can really say. We do know that winters will always come, with their unearthly, brutal beauty alongside their frigid cold and inconveniences. And we have faith, in the middle of every February, that spring will come. So we dream, so we yearn, so we hope. And in that reflection on dreaming in winter and hoping in spring, I found it, again, my answer for how to use this blog. It started out as a public journal to process the pandemic; now it remains a public space to process, to reflect, and, I think, to dream.
“A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep...”
