the holy cloak of stillness

by bam

snow morning

view out my window at daybreak

the day was abuzz with the news: it was coming, beware! by twilight, the first shreds of evidence appeared — couldn’t have been more gentle, scant flakes tumbling, every once in a while caught in the porch light. and the broadcasts blared on: this winter’s big snow, enough snow to cancel the school bells, enough snow to bring on battalions of plows, it was coming. children — especially a high schooler i know with a giant biology test due for today — let out a whoop and slammed closed the text books. meiosis and mitosis would have to wait.

i went to bed. with the blinds up because there is nothing i love so much as awaking to snow fall. no matter the hour. the earlier the better.

and so i awoke to the holiest sound i know: still silence. not a peep or a plow. the barest whoosh of air swirling through snow-covered limbs. i stood there and drank it all in. only now, an hour or so after the light seeped in, only now is the faint chorus of chirps beginning to stir. not a plow. not a shovel. not a footfall.

a morning like this, i often think, is the closest God comes to putting a finger to lips, whispering, shhhhhhhhh. 

be still. 

open your ears, open your soul. drink. drink in the stillness, the quiet, the pause. settle your soul. put aside the rumblings that rumble. this dawn, this start to the day, is reminder: the holiest sound in the whole wide world is the sound of just listening. remember to listen.

what do you hear?  

it’s prescriptive, a snowfall like this. of all the choices in the meteorological tool kit, no other one comes with the soundtrack of silence. except, i suppose, pure sunshine. but then, for me anyway, that comes with an undercoat of moaning. too much sun and i start to wilt. i’ll take a brisk pure snow any day.

i intend to listen all day. i intend to pull out the blankets and mugs. i intend to settle onto the couch with my sweet boy who runs this way and that. he’s caught in the snow trap today. everything is cancelled. hallelujah!

just now, a bolt of scarlet feather flashed by the window and settled down on the snow-mounded feeder. i took it as a call for breakfast — a bird call, that is — so i shoved my toes into boots, and scooped up a can of sunflower seeds. it goes against my grain to unsettle snow, but i grabbed the shovel anyway — the cardinal was hungry, you see. and i shoveled myself a path. there’s at least a foot of snow out there. and with more abandon than usual, i dumped. there is now black seed speckling my snow because i decided to share with the squirrels, and the big red fox should he decide to show up today. (he’s been ambling by more and more often; the other morning, in fact, he curled up for a long winter’s nap — a good three-quarters-of-an-hour nap — smack in the middle of the yard, circling this way and that till he found just the right lump for a pillow.)

red fox thinking
red fox napping

and now, as the snow drips from my hair, the flakes out the window have plumped to double or triple their original size. no wonder when we were little we liked the idea that the angels were having a pillow fight. and the heavenly feathers were spilling all over. i could sit here all day, announcing the shift in the flakes and the fall.

and maybe, just maybe, i will….

a day of pure stillness is ours. and i intend to savor it all. and quiet my soul while i’m at it…

what will you do with your day? snow day, or rain day, or day of pure sunshine, depending upon your spot on the weather map?