Have you been to the beach recently? While you were there, did you play in the sand? Did you build a sandcastle? Sandcastles have always fascinated me, but not because of their artistic appeal. That is not to say that I don't appreciate art; that simply is not the feature of the sandcastle that attracts me. No, what attracts me is its futility. Have you ever thought about it? Sand is one of the most temporary and changeable features of our planet, constantly shifting and redistributing from corner of the world to another, never staying in one place for long. And yet we try to persuade it to match the shape we dictate?
I was never really one for making sandcastles. The concept of an actual castle was too complex for me, with ramparts and parapets and spires completely beyond my eleven year old abilities. But I understood the concept of a fortress. You needed a keep first (where else would the prince live?), and then walls--very high walls--to protect the keep, and finally a moat to protect the walls. This was the basic layout of all of my "sandcastles," with modest variations based upon necessity or mood. I needed no frills and embellishments, and so my castles usually ended up looking like a network of glorified molehills. I was utilitarian at heart, building only that which would accomplish its intended purpose: halting the relentless march of the sea elves upon my peaceful castle.
That was the exciting part of building, to me. I always wanted to see if my miniature kingdom would stand against the forces of nature. There was a certain element of risk associated with building a fortress like mine, because I needed to harvest the damp sand left by the receding water in order to build a solid structure. This meant that I would build as the tides transitioned from high to low. By the time I finished, the tides had reversed and I watched in helpless fascination as the sea moved toward me.
I loved heaping more sand upon the walls, trying to shore up my dissolving defenses even as the water lapped against them. Without fail, the water would use my moats to eat away my foundation, my walls would fall into the rising tide, and my keep--a massive heap of hardened sand--would feel the full force of the sea's fury. It became an island, raising its head defiantly out of the midst of the horde, until finally, it would resign itself to its fate and sink beneath the waves.
This defeat was inevitable, but in my childish confidence I believed that I could reverse the typical progression of events, shout my defiance at the waves, and watch them part around me and my castle like the Red Sea around Moses and the Israelites. They say that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, but it is also a trademark of youth.
And perhaps they are the same thing, in a small way. It is considered a sign of maturity, is it not, to resign ourselves to the inevitable and the rational? As children, we dream of becoming astronauts, rock stars, bestselling authors... Then we grow up and become bankers, engineers, or insurance agents. We resign ourselves to the "real world" and trade our dreams for paychecks. And it is considered proper. It is considered a rite of passage, a ticket to the adult world.
Put off your insanity. Put on our reality.
"Life is not fair," we hear them tell us. "Work is not fun. Play is a reward for work. Ninety-five percent of your life will be work, and occasionally, occasionally, you will get the chance to relax and be yourself." Then they leave and go to see their counselors, throw back their heads and swallow their anti-depressants, go hang out at bars and then form support groups for alcoholism... And all the while they tell us that this is life, that this is our destiny, even that this is good.
We all know that they don't really believe it, but what can we do, except shrug and accept the burden?
I have always hated any sort of inevitability. Always. I hate the feeling that I cannot control my life, that I cannot change my fate. If we don't have the ability to choose our own path, what do we have? A long path of regrets stretching behind us, and an equally long road of unavoidable pain stretching before us. Call it my rebellious nature or my teenage male, coming-of-age, independence syndrome, but I refuse. I refuse to comply with this sawdust taste of resignation, for it is a taste far too close to despair.
And so I have a problem with God.
I am not Carrie Underwood, who calls out for her God to control her life. I have always sought to keep a tight-fisted grip on the wheel, a grip that I once swore I would never relinquish. My white knuckles have been my badge of honor, a symbol that I will never allow myself to become another old man filled with regret.
But it isn't a matter of disbelief. It isn't a matter of hate, or even of defiance. My problem is a problem with trust. My life is defined by fear: fear of the unknown, fear of helplessness, fear of loss... I have never believed that God has my best interests in mind. The whole idea of His sovereignty has always made me picture a puppeteer in the sky, moving around His pawns and acting out an elaborate story without any care for the characters within it. Trusting God has seemed like something for super-Christians, for religious people like my pastor, my parents, and many of my friends. I would always pull out the good old standbys to help a struggling friend, telling them that God has a plan for them, telling them to trust Him with their lives. I have become very adept at giving good advice, spreading hope, and persuading others to trust God.
Sometimes I even persuade myself.
Over the past few days I have had plenty of time for introspection, which usually takes the form of questioning myself. And the longer I question, the more I come to doubt my previous assumptions and experiences. There has to be a spectrum of living. There has to be some sort of variation besides merely black and white. There have to be more than two choices. I have to be able to choose something between resignation and defiance, between indifference and distrust. There has to be more to life than one or the other evil.
For I believe both are evil.
The fact remains that God does control our lives. I can rage away, I can shake my fist at Him, I can stamp my feet and scream my defiance, but that does not change anything. Nor does my tight grip on the steering wheel change the fact that the car of my life will always go where He directs it to go.
How do you escape from someone Who knows all things, Who is everywhere, and Who can do anything?
I think now that there is little difference between surrender and helplessness. The two go hand-in-hand, because you do not surrender to something until you realize that you are helpless to resist them. Is it not better to surrender than to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to your fate? At the very least, it is less undignified.
Perhaps that is the real mark of maturity. It is not actually surrender to a life we disdain. Instead, it is surrender to a plan for a life we want to be different. And that plan is not mine, that plan is not yours. That plan is His.
Do I know that He cares? No, I don't. Certainly, the Bible tells me that He does, but I have nothing to back that up. I can't guarantee that He won't turn around one day and screw me over with immense pain instead of the joy He promises. I can't guarantee that I even matter to Him, and so I keep my hands on the tiller of my life.
Or maybe not.
Is it better to sit at the back of the boat, trying to steer my life through the rapids? Or is it better to sit in the front of the boat, the breeze and spray of experience in my face, an experienced Captain at my back?
After all, life is a lot more fun if we loosen up a little. Is there risk? Well, yeah, but don't you find it exhilarating? Breathe it in, that fear. We're not driving anymore, so let's enjoy this speed. I have a feeling we won't crash.
Title is from "In The Dirt"
Lyrics by S. Carey
Friday, January 17, 2014
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Something You Can't Replace
Our family does not all celebrate Christmas together. I suppose it's not a unique phenomenon, as there are doubtless other families whose extended branches are too far-flung to be gathered back to the root every holiday. It has made for some fun Christmas finagling; we celebrated on Christmas Eve and Christmas night with my mom's parents (who live a half-mile up the road), but that was the extent of our family celebrations (outside of our immediate family) until this weekend.
My mom's sister's family live in Alpharetta, just outside Atlanta, and so both their driving up and our driving down are far too much of a hassle for even a long weekend. We used to celebrate Christmas with them back in the days when my cousins and siblings and I were all munchkins, but as our lives got busier, neither of our families ended up being able to make the ten-hour drive to share festivities. It's sad that the distance between us keeps us from being able to keep making those memories, but sometimes the necessities of life force us to make sacrifices.
My dad's side of the family (his dad and his sister's family), however, lives in North Carolina, which is a much more manageable distance, and so yesterday and today constituted our surrogate Christmas. We watched my little sister play basketball (the first people in nine years to wear face paint to an Upward Basketball game), shared verivorst (a traditional Estonian Christmas dish consisting of barley soaked in blood and cooked in a sausage skin: literally "blood sausage") and sauerkraut and pork roast and sweet potatoes, observed a short food fight (that was courtesy of my little sister and our boisterous cousin) that was quickly put down by parental authority, and then chatted late into the night while some people watched the Patriots trounce the Colts.
They just left our house, and it was, like all partings, a bittersweet one. I am very much a social creature, and so leaving someone or watching someone leave is always very difficult for me. Not in the sense that I'm about to break down and cry, but merely in the sense that I thrive on connection and relationship, and that I feel dry when I have to part from a family member who is a source of that for me. It's hard for me to say goodbye, especially when I don't very often get to see the people to whom I have to say it.
It's funny to think about the things that we crave, especially in light of the God Who created us. Why would He have programmed into my DNA a hunger for people and relationships so intense that it hurts to be without them? Why, for that matter, did He choose to become a person and live among His creations?
Relationships are not built by people. Think about it: do you remember how you met your best friend? Maybe you do, but do you remember the moment when they became as important to you as they are now? Did you choose for that to happen? Or did it just sort of... happen? Relationships are, in the purest sense of the word, accidental. We do not plan for them to happen. In a sense, they are like gravity: a byproduct of the interaction between two objects (in this case, persons). Certainly, God planned each relationship you have, but you did not, and if you were to look at who knows whom and who gets along with whom, there is no pattern to it. There is no rational formula we can use to predict relationships, and yet they are the most meaningful part of our lives.
Why?
God has a very interesting nature, and one unique in the entirety of existence. He is three distinct people in one complete person, which means that His very make-up and personality is based upon interaction and relationships. This was the entire root of why it was not good for man to be alone. Man is created in the image of God, and if God is relationship, how could man truly mirror His nature without someone to be in relationship with?
And that was also why God came down to earth as Jesus: to be in relationship with us. One of the limitations of our finite minds is that we cannot really relate to that which is different from us. We are uncomfortable around the new, the weird, the other. And God is nothing if not different from humanity. We are mortal, but He is immortal. We have one body, but He is everywhere. We know only what we have experienced, but He knows everything. We have limitations, but He can do anything. How could we really relate to someone like Him when He seems so very alien? We needed Him to be like us so that we could learn how to love Him in our simple, broken way.
And so He came.
God has inserted in us this deep need for relationships. Some people try to fill it with friends and family. Other people try to convince themselves that their love is enough to satisfy them. But the truth is that we want perfect love. We crave a friendship that will never disappoint us, a love that will never break our hearts, and so no human relationship we have will ever be enough. "My soul thirsts for God," says Psalm 42, and that is the perfect description of the feeling. Our lives are so empty when we try to fill our thirst with other things, because we need God. He programmed us to need Him. Imagine trying to fill your stomach with cotton candy, and then think that is what we try to do nearly all our lives.
We don't understand how desperately we desire God's love in our lives, because we don't ever take the time to stop and think about how much those around us disappoint us. It feels like a betrayal, doesn't it? It feels like it's somehow our problem, that we aren't happy with the friendships we have. It feels like we should be more grateful, that we need to try harder, that we should focus on the positive and ignore the negative. And so we buy each other chocolate and go for strolls down the beach, we make reservations at fancy restaurants and make ourselves look prettier for those we love. We do anything we can to drown out the voice God has placed inside us, that little reminder that tells us, "You are missing out on life."
So many of us experience a crisis in our lives because we feel ashamed of this voice. We don't see it as an invitation, we see it as a curse. We go to counselors to try to drown it out. We practice meditating, thinking positively, making lists of things we are grateful for, and yet we get no closer to finding peace. The voice of God is insistent, and will not be silenced by self-help tactics.
So we buy a fancy new car. We get a new job. We leave our families and start dating that cute girl from the office, that attractive guy who made eyes at us. Some of us quit our jobs and start a 401 (c). Others go to seminary, or move to India to share the Gospel.
Now, I am not trying to denigrate new cars or new jobs. I'm not trying to preach against the evils of non-profit organizations or the ministry. (I do not, however, condone in any way adultery or divorce.) All I am trying to point out is that we almost always miss the point. Even if we correctly diagnose the problem (albeit crudely) as a lack of "spirituality," our remedies will 99% be focused on the wrong thing.
We can't earn God's love with our actions. We cannot earn happiness with our actions, either, because our happiness is dependent on our relationships with God. When we try to do stuff to be more spiritual, we will fail, because spirituality is not an action. Spirituality is a state of our hearts, of our minds. The only way we can become more spiritual is by growing closer in our relationships with God.
How do we do that? Honestly, I'm still on a learning curve with this. I'm just a seventeen-year-old guy, and I have very few of the answers to life. All I know is that I have never been happier than when I am close to my Father, and I also know that when I am not close to my Father, doing churchy things, performing little religious rituals, and reading pithy pamphlets do nothing to solve the problem.
Our relationships with God are just that: relationships. How do you grow closer to another person? How do you strengthen your relationship? You spend time with them. You tell them about your life, about your hopes and dreams, about your fears and struggles. Certainly, God knows all of this already, but that doesn't matter. He wouldn't have put this desire for Him in our hearts if He didn't want us to be in a relationship with Him. It might seem silly, telling God things He already knows, but in doing so, we learn more about ourselves and we move ourselves into a position of openness toward God.
Maybe that's where we truly hear His voice.
Title is from "Fix You"
Lyrics by C. Martin
My mom's sister's family live in Alpharetta, just outside Atlanta, and so both their driving up and our driving down are far too much of a hassle for even a long weekend. We used to celebrate Christmas with them back in the days when my cousins and siblings and I were all munchkins, but as our lives got busier, neither of our families ended up being able to make the ten-hour drive to share festivities. It's sad that the distance between us keeps us from being able to keep making those memories, but sometimes the necessities of life force us to make sacrifices.
My dad's side of the family (his dad and his sister's family), however, lives in North Carolina, which is a much more manageable distance, and so yesterday and today constituted our surrogate Christmas. We watched my little sister play basketball (the first people in nine years to wear face paint to an Upward Basketball game), shared verivorst (a traditional Estonian Christmas dish consisting of barley soaked in blood and cooked in a sausage skin: literally "blood sausage") and sauerkraut and pork roast and sweet potatoes, observed a short food fight (that was courtesy of my little sister and our boisterous cousin) that was quickly put down by parental authority, and then chatted late into the night while some people watched the Patriots trounce the Colts.
They just left our house, and it was, like all partings, a bittersweet one. I am very much a social creature, and so leaving someone or watching someone leave is always very difficult for me. Not in the sense that I'm about to break down and cry, but merely in the sense that I thrive on connection and relationship, and that I feel dry when I have to part from a family member who is a source of that for me. It's hard for me to say goodbye, especially when I don't very often get to see the people to whom I have to say it.
It's funny to think about the things that we crave, especially in light of the God Who created us. Why would He have programmed into my DNA a hunger for people and relationships so intense that it hurts to be without them? Why, for that matter, did He choose to become a person and live among His creations?
Relationships are not built by people. Think about it: do you remember how you met your best friend? Maybe you do, but do you remember the moment when they became as important to you as they are now? Did you choose for that to happen? Or did it just sort of... happen? Relationships are, in the purest sense of the word, accidental. We do not plan for them to happen. In a sense, they are like gravity: a byproduct of the interaction between two objects (in this case, persons). Certainly, God planned each relationship you have, but you did not, and if you were to look at who knows whom and who gets along with whom, there is no pattern to it. There is no rational formula we can use to predict relationships, and yet they are the most meaningful part of our lives.
Why?
God has a very interesting nature, and one unique in the entirety of existence. He is three distinct people in one complete person, which means that His very make-up and personality is based upon interaction and relationships. This was the entire root of why it was not good for man to be alone. Man is created in the image of God, and if God is relationship, how could man truly mirror His nature without someone to be in relationship with?
And that was also why God came down to earth as Jesus: to be in relationship with us. One of the limitations of our finite minds is that we cannot really relate to that which is different from us. We are uncomfortable around the new, the weird, the other. And God is nothing if not different from humanity. We are mortal, but He is immortal. We have one body, but He is everywhere. We know only what we have experienced, but He knows everything. We have limitations, but He can do anything. How could we really relate to someone like Him when He seems so very alien? We needed Him to be like us so that we could learn how to love Him in our simple, broken way.
And so He came.
God has inserted in us this deep need for relationships. Some people try to fill it with friends and family. Other people try to convince themselves that their love is enough to satisfy them. But the truth is that we want perfect love. We crave a friendship that will never disappoint us, a love that will never break our hearts, and so no human relationship we have will ever be enough. "My soul thirsts for God," says Psalm 42, and that is the perfect description of the feeling. Our lives are so empty when we try to fill our thirst with other things, because we need God. He programmed us to need Him. Imagine trying to fill your stomach with cotton candy, and then think that is what we try to do nearly all our lives.
We don't understand how desperately we desire God's love in our lives, because we don't ever take the time to stop and think about how much those around us disappoint us. It feels like a betrayal, doesn't it? It feels like it's somehow our problem, that we aren't happy with the friendships we have. It feels like we should be more grateful, that we need to try harder, that we should focus on the positive and ignore the negative. And so we buy each other chocolate and go for strolls down the beach, we make reservations at fancy restaurants and make ourselves look prettier for those we love. We do anything we can to drown out the voice God has placed inside us, that little reminder that tells us, "You are missing out on life."
So many of us experience a crisis in our lives because we feel ashamed of this voice. We don't see it as an invitation, we see it as a curse. We go to counselors to try to drown it out. We practice meditating, thinking positively, making lists of things we are grateful for, and yet we get no closer to finding peace. The voice of God is insistent, and will not be silenced by self-help tactics.
So we buy a fancy new car. We get a new job. We leave our families and start dating that cute girl from the office, that attractive guy who made eyes at us. Some of us quit our jobs and start a 401 (c). Others go to seminary, or move to India to share the Gospel.
Now, I am not trying to denigrate new cars or new jobs. I'm not trying to preach against the evils of non-profit organizations or the ministry. (I do not, however, condone in any way adultery or divorce.) All I am trying to point out is that we almost always miss the point. Even if we correctly diagnose the problem (albeit crudely) as a lack of "spirituality," our remedies will 99% be focused on the wrong thing.
We can't earn God's love with our actions. We cannot earn happiness with our actions, either, because our happiness is dependent on our relationships with God. When we try to do stuff to be more spiritual, we will fail, because spirituality is not an action. Spirituality is a state of our hearts, of our minds. The only way we can become more spiritual is by growing closer in our relationships with God.
How do we do that? Honestly, I'm still on a learning curve with this. I'm just a seventeen-year-old guy, and I have very few of the answers to life. All I know is that I have never been happier than when I am close to my Father, and I also know that when I am not close to my Father, doing churchy things, performing little religious rituals, and reading pithy pamphlets do nothing to solve the problem.
Our relationships with God are just that: relationships. How do you grow closer to another person? How do you strengthen your relationship? You spend time with them. You tell them about your life, about your hopes and dreams, about your fears and struggles. Certainly, God knows all of this already, but that doesn't matter. He wouldn't have put this desire for Him in our hearts if He didn't want us to be in a relationship with Him. It might seem silly, telling God things He already knows, but in doing so, we learn more about ourselves and we move ourselves into a position of openness toward God.
Maybe that's where we truly hear His voice.
Title is from "Fix You"
Lyrics by C. Martin
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Grateful for the Time
I got to sleep in this morning, although most of my friends would probably not think of it as sleeping in. Normally, I get up at five o'clock in order to be ready for work at six thirty (I'm part of the second wave of the opening shift at Chick-fil-A), but I only work four days a week in order to be able to have time for schoolwork and sanity in my schedule. Wednesdays are one of my days off, and so I did not have to get up until six thirty. What a difference to be woken up by my sister instead of by a demanding electronic pattern (courtesy of my watch)! It makes an unbelievable difference in the way I view my day.
It begs a question, though, doesn't it? What other parts of our lives are affected by the way we start them? That conversation you had with your friend the other day, how did it go? Would the raised voices and hurt feelings have been present if you had started the talk with a smile and a softer tone? What about your shift at work last week? Is it possible you would have been happier and more productive if you had allowed yourself just a few moments to breathe and pray before you had to rush into the office?
Everything in our lives follows a logical progression from the moment of its inception to the time it ends. If you start something off on a sour note, that mood will compound over time until the end result is something on which you have spent more emotional energy than should ever have been expended. If you move into it with an open mind and lightness of heart, many of the issues that would normally seem like enormous obstacles will be quickly overcome.
That is not to say that a bad beginning automatically negates any benefit of an outcome! There are many people who have come from broken homes and built amazing and beautiful lives anyway. I have dear friends who began their marriage with all the wrong goals and perspectives, and yet they have managed to transform their home into a place of beauty. Joy can bloom out of a sorrowful stem; it just takes far more effort than it otherwise would. Love can emerge from hate; it just takes dedication to right the wrongs we have already committed. A life based upon greed and avarice took a visitation by four spirits to redeem to selflessness. A relationship founded in secrecy and deceit takes courage and commitment to bring into the light.
I am not really one for New Year's resolutions, but I think this one is important enough that I must risk myself and take a stand upon it. This year, I resolve to take the time to think before I act, to pause for a moment to place myself in a right place before I begin any project, to strap on my armor before I head out into the darkness to sow my influence. This year, I resolve to begin to craft a legacy of joy instead of one of sorrow. According to some experts, I have about seventy-six years to live, which means I am getting close to the quarter-way mark of my life. I have already made a thousand choices; some of them have been good, many of them have been bad, but all of them have been mine. I resolve now to make my choices such that the lives I touch will be changed for the better.
I started yesterday off on the wrong foot, and the whole day felt off-kilter. The sun has this funny habit of circling the world, though, and so yesterday was not today, nor will today be tomorrow. You can't un-start a bad beginning, but you can continue well, and you can make your next beginning a better one. That's the beauty of this life, and of the God who gives it to us. "Through the LORD's mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness." (Lamentations 3:22 & 23)
Title is from "Gossamer Thread"
Lyrics by D. Gray
It begs a question, though, doesn't it? What other parts of our lives are affected by the way we start them? That conversation you had with your friend the other day, how did it go? Would the raised voices and hurt feelings have been present if you had started the talk with a smile and a softer tone? What about your shift at work last week? Is it possible you would have been happier and more productive if you had allowed yourself just a few moments to breathe and pray before you had to rush into the office?
Everything in our lives follows a logical progression from the moment of its inception to the time it ends. If you start something off on a sour note, that mood will compound over time until the end result is something on which you have spent more emotional energy than should ever have been expended. If you move into it with an open mind and lightness of heart, many of the issues that would normally seem like enormous obstacles will be quickly overcome.
That is not to say that a bad beginning automatically negates any benefit of an outcome! There are many people who have come from broken homes and built amazing and beautiful lives anyway. I have dear friends who began their marriage with all the wrong goals and perspectives, and yet they have managed to transform their home into a place of beauty. Joy can bloom out of a sorrowful stem; it just takes far more effort than it otherwise would. Love can emerge from hate; it just takes dedication to right the wrongs we have already committed. A life based upon greed and avarice took a visitation by four spirits to redeem to selflessness. A relationship founded in secrecy and deceit takes courage and commitment to bring into the light.
I am not really one for New Year's resolutions, but I think this one is important enough that I must risk myself and take a stand upon it. This year, I resolve to take the time to think before I act, to pause for a moment to place myself in a right place before I begin any project, to strap on my armor before I head out into the darkness to sow my influence. This year, I resolve to begin to craft a legacy of joy instead of one of sorrow. According to some experts, I have about seventy-six years to live, which means I am getting close to the quarter-way mark of my life. I have already made a thousand choices; some of them have been good, many of them have been bad, but all of them have been mine. I resolve now to make my choices such that the lives I touch will be changed for the better.
I started yesterday off on the wrong foot, and the whole day felt off-kilter. The sun has this funny habit of circling the world, though, and so yesterday was not today, nor will today be tomorrow. You can't un-start a bad beginning, but you can continue well, and you can make your next beginning a better one. That's the beauty of this life, and of the God who gives it to us. "Through the LORD's mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness." (Lamentations 3:22 & 23)
Title is from "Gossamer Thread"
Lyrics by D. Gray
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Cold As Charity
Well, Old Man Winter has caught up to us at last. I suppose it was inevitable--he's been threatening us with a visit for long enough--but that knowledge makes the meeting no more pleasant. Record-breaking lows across the continent! Imagine, just a few years ago, weren't we hearing refrains of global warming and melting ice caps? The ice in the gutters alongside the boulevard cries foul.
So here I sit, huddled in too many layers, wishing for a respite our guest seems loathe to give. My fingers swell as they remember how it feels to be warm, and my still-numb face swears that all is well, no harm is done! But its plastered smile and glazed-over eyes belie its bravado. I shiver.
I must say, however, that Winter does have style. What an entrance! From 67 to 15 in just twenty-four hours? I envy the pure nerve of it: a stunningly successful coup d'etat that has finally reduced us all to victims of his tyranny, victims who can do naught but wish for the return of any of his more amiable family members.
The Duchess of Fall, a stately maid, stands aloof, though she welcomes all who come to pay their respects. Her carefully trimmed eyebrows and tightly wound bun suggest a matron or a governess, and thus she is; she smiles graciously upon you until the moment you push her too far, then turns cold and severe as alabaster. Her dress is crimson and jacinthe, and she wears a corset.
Lord Spring plays his lute with easy grace, arrayed in brilliant multicolored majesty. Fields and gardens are his domain, cultivated parks and windowsills his natural habitat. Certainly, moors and woodlands feel his reign, yet his true love is the dainty and the fair. He is patron to youth and beauty, darling of lovers, hope for the aged. When he smiles, the sky blooms blue and stars sprout from the ground as hyacinths and daffodils. And he smiles often.
And then there is Queen Summer, most unlike her somber uncle in form and mannerisms. She is quick-witted and cheeky, fearless to the point of impropriety. She opens all doors and all windows, dances on birdsong and sunlight, and invites the world to share in her picnic. She is all green and gold and blue, sunshine and grass and seaweed, beaches and lighthouses and amusement parks, miles and miles of dandelions... She takes no one seriously, but loves the world with fierce and wild abandon.
And yet, for now, we are forced to entertain the ugly duckling of the family, humoring him with coats and gloves and scarves and red noses and steamy breath and frosty cheeks. He never more than chuckles, knowing that we will miss him when he is gone.
Make no mistake, miss him I will, for he has his own cruel beauty: the glistening of frost on grey-brown grass, the reaching of naked branches to cloud-smothered sky, and the huddling together for warmth of close friends. He is a careless acquaintance, the kind whom I will remember long after he forgets me.
And so I look out my window at the icy world where he holds sway, and I revel in the marvels of modern air conditioning. Come and nip at my heels, Old Man Winter. Two can play at this game, and tomorrow I will turn on my car and begin to scrape away your ice-paintings.
Title is from "Christmas At Sea"
Lyrics by R. L. Stevenson
So here I sit, huddled in too many layers, wishing for a respite our guest seems loathe to give. My fingers swell as they remember how it feels to be warm, and my still-numb face swears that all is well, no harm is done! But its plastered smile and glazed-over eyes belie its bravado. I shiver.
I must say, however, that Winter does have style. What an entrance! From 67 to 15 in just twenty-four hours? I envy the pure nerve of it: a stunningly successful coup d'etat that has finally reduced us all to victims of his tyranny, victims who can do naught but wish for the return of any of his more amiable family members.
The Duchess of Fall, a stately maid, stands aloof, though she welcomes all who come to pay their respects. Her carefully trimmed eyebrows and tightly wound bun suggest a matron or a governess, and thus she is; she smiles graciously upon you until the moment you push her too far, then turns cold and severe as alabaster. Her dress is crimson and jacinthe, and she wears a corset.
Lord Spring plays his lute with easy grace, arrayed in brilliant multicolored majesty. Fields and gardens are his domain, cultivated parks and windowsills his natural habitat. Certainly, moors and woodlands feel his reign, yet his true love is the dainty and the fair. He is patron to youth and beauty, darling of lovers, hope for the aged. When he smiles, the sky blooms blue and stars sprout from the ground as hyacinths and daffodils. And he smiles often.
And then there is Queen Summer, most unlike her somber uncle in form and mannerisms. She is quick-witted and cheeky, fearless to the point of impropriety. She opens all doors and all windows, dances on birdsong and sunlight, and invites the world to share in her picnic. She is all green and gold and blue, sunshine and grass and seaweed, beaches and lighthouses and amusement parks, miles and miles of dandelions... She takes no one seriously, but loves the world with fierce and wild abandon.
And yet, for now, we are forced to entertain the ugly duckling of the family, humoring him with coats and gloves and scarves and red noses and steamy breath and frosty cheeks. He never more than chuckles, knowing that we will miss him when he is gone.
Make no mistake, miss him I will, for he has his own cruel beauty: the glistening of frost on grey-brown grass, the reaching of naked branches to cloud-smothered sky, and the huddling together for warmth of close friends. He is a careless acquaintance, the kind whom I will remember long after he forgets me.
And so I look out my window at the icy world where he holds sway, and I revel in the marvels of modern air conditioning. Come and nip at my heels, Old Man Winter. Two can play at this game, and tomorrow I will turn on my car and begin to scrape away your ice-paintings.
Title is from "Christmas At Sea"
Lyrics by R. L. Stevenson
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