Winter sun

January 25, 2022 

All day I’ve experienced an overwhelmingly warm and powerful sense of wellbeing.

I love the Indo-European root kailo-. From that root we get so many nourishing words: wholeness, health, hale (as in hearty and...), wholesome, healing, hallowed, and holy. A depth of wisdom is expressed in a language where health comes from the same root as whole, and where healing and holiness are bound into that same family.

I’m a Self-help Junkie and am perennially dissatisfied with what I can accomplish in an hour, day, or year. This weekend, in yet one more attempt to harness my potential, and very aware, painfully aware, that I’m running out of time and personal resources (on turning 65), I devised a schedule for the week, mapping out what I would do each half hour of the day, from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Jim looked at my list and asked if it were punishment. I can see where he’s coming from, but I really didn’t think it was.

And this first day of the experiment bears it out. I’ve somehow given myself permission to actually accomplish my aspirations, from mundane but satisfying housework: laundry and sweeping and meal preparation, through answering emails, writing up board meeting minutes, and on to my greatest aspiration: writing.

Last winter, with so many activities cancelled or relegated to Zoom, I wrote about Fierce February Light and sunlight Piercing the Windowpanes. Activities still aren't back to pre-pandemic 'normal.' I find myself home all day on many days. I follow the sun's progress, rising in my south window and then falling to the west. It feels like magic. Distinct from a month ago, the sunlight pours into the windows all day with a different substance to it. I can feel without measuring that the sun is reaching higher at its zenith. All day I can tell it will set later than a week ago.

It has now set, making the woods behind the apartment buildings look soft and furry. I’ve always had that false impression, that the winter hills of New England and Pennsylvania (place of my nativity) are covered in brown sable fur and not made of prickly twigs and branches and hard trunks. It's a beautiful illusion.

The sunshine instills me with a deep and peaceful hope. Something is coming unstuck inside me.

Baby boy

Living in Indiana and New Hampshire, back in the 80s, I watched with mild envy during Christmas programs while some other young mother held her newborn baby in the annual nativity tableau. Peter was born too late, in mid-January, Matt and Sam were springtime babies; David was nearly three months old by Christmas.

This month, while we tended two of our grandchildren: Eliza, age 4, and Link (Lincoln), age 1, for nine days, I started learning "Mary Did You Know". I was inspired by our friend, Marilyn Foley Jodoin, who died November 22nd. Many remembrances of her included how she sang that song each Christmas, accompanying herself on guitar, her long, red hair swaying to the music. Eliza sang it to us, impressing us with how much of it she knew by heart.

So, at four in the morning, I sang it, over and over, to soothe wakeful Link. I looked into his clear but troubled eyes and wondered at the miracle of this baby boy. I realized that I'd always focused on the story of one night, but that baby of Bethlehem grew up, day by day: one week, one month, one year. I'm sure his mother marveled each day, long after the shepherds and magi were gone home, just as I had for my own six children and as I do now for our dear grandchildren. I’ve never felt closer to the story of Bethlehem than while looking into the large blue eyes of our babe of Boston.