January 2022 - Winter Sun

A solitary, empty, stone urn sits in front of me.  A patinated pedestal filled with frozen earth, and beyond it a tidy holly hedge blocks this little corner of nature from the surrounding houses.  It is a sheltered, sun-dappled place where I have sat often before, quiet and very nearly warm on these brightly brisk winter days - a perfect thoughtful spot.  These really are the best days of winter: when  the mornings are frosty and the air is almost too cold to breath deeply, then those mornings fade into afternoons like this one, afternoons of crystalline skies and almost warm enough sunshine. 

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Glory be to God for dappled things!

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

If you sit on the ground one of these afternoons, and close your eyes in a sheltered spot where the sun shines through and the wind is stilled, sometime between the frosts of morning and evening, you can almost imagine a whole host of tiny roots slowly waking up in the earth beneath, tempted by the sunshine warmth to rouse from their winter's rest, and beginning to think about sending out new shoots and new life.  It feels as though all creation around me is tentatively, half-way waking.  Perhaps, when the frost returns tonight, all those curious little roots and sprouts with nestle back down into the warm depths of the soil once more, realizing that winter isn't yet over with that wonderful feeling of waking too early on a Saturday morning, and discovering that there's no need to dash out into the chilly world just yet.

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It was one of those days when...
it is summer in the light and winter in the shade.

- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Wild daffodil noses are peering up in the dappled patch of woods along the sidewalk.  And a cacophonous pair of Canada geese have taken up residence, despite the glowering disapproval of the neighborhood homeowners' association, in the undergrowth of the tidy holly hedge.  I've heard these next few weeks referred to as the quickening of the year.  What a lovely phrase.  It is the season when the first tiny glimpses of waking life are just beginning to appear again. 

... a new year, full of things that never have been...

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Though ice still clings to the grasses around the mouth of a little culvert nearby, and the bushes are still white with frost most mornings, still it seems that perhaps, slowly and happily, the world is indeed beginning to quicken.