Speak to me of winter, and I will treasure the tapestry you weave.
Tell me how hungry ravens squawk by your compost pile waiting for scraps of potato peel, broccoli stems, or bits of yesterday’s sandwich. How you have come to revere this mystical courier who carries a soul’s secret dispatch across the thin veil to the Great Mystery.
Describe the way the wind howls through the merest gap in your upper bathroom window, canted during these long years. Remind me what it’s like to stand on tiptoe to glimpse curls of snow, like white frosting, and to hear the old oaks groaning at wood’s edge.
Regale me with tales of b
lazing fires, radiating warmth through layers of t-shirts and turtlenecks, knitted sweaters and corduroys. Of the card games you played on brief Sunday afternoons in the fire’s light: Hearts, Double-Solitaire, Euchre, and Oh Heck. And when you lost – it’s true, you seldom won – you didn’t mind.
Tell me about the color of the sky – is it a day of brightest blue or petulant gray? And of the next snowfall: You love how storms cause a necessary slowing, even while quickening the pulse and liberating Wild Woman, if only for a time.
Describe the aromas that rise from the stew you are most certainly making, hands busy chopping and stirring while you look out your kitchen window and marvel how puffed-up chickadees and cardinals, nuthatches and finches carry on without hesitation in gusty onshore winds.
Speak to me of your dreams during these longest, darkest nights – of being nestled by rhinos, visited by eagles, and spared by wolves. Recount how you’ve reclaimed the ancient dreamways, to reveal and honor the secret and most elemental wishes of your soul.
Speak to me of winter. I will treasure the tapestry you weave.