Closer to the Bone
A changing of the guard. The manual transmission of winter--a slowing in the work of the hands, the transition in rhythms and seasons of gardening and woodgathering. It is an in-between season of dark mornings, from this room the smell of woodsmoke, and beyond the window, forest vistas open like a curtain pulled aside.
There is a spareness and skeletal simplicity about winter that bare trees conjure for me--an essential core of being that both comforts and unsettles. I make my peace with its call this morning in what feels more than ever like the autumn of our lives here.
Our leaves are turning, falling. Sap sinks below ground. Molecular gyrations slow and water turns hard as iron. And one hopes for spring, knowing if one comes, it will be from a vanishing supply, each day more precious than the last, from a smaller stock of them, sands through the hourglass, more visible and terrible-wondrous when the leaves have fallen.
Winter is a naked time, and we are exposed not to the elements cloistered here next to the woodstove, but to self, to the core of who we are apart from the roles we play under a warm sun and the leafery of summer, all the easier now to feel the winds of time that surge past and through us, warm and firmly planted in this one morning of time.