JohnLines

Snow beginner.

Yesterday, as it snowed, life slowed.

Somewhere, in the minds of those who didn’t have to venture out, there may have been a sense of unimaginable joy.  Of unexpected freedom.  Of the chains of the everyday being broken.

Trust me, you don’t have to be in school to feel this.  It’s been a long time since I paid attention to the TV scrawl with closing announcements.  (I didn’t know there was a school named St. Cripsin’s of the Hollow Woods ...?)

Why is this?

Snow, deep snow, is a fresh start after a complete stop.  It is beginner’s mind.  Where else could this joy come from? 

It is a all-too-infrequent reminder that being takes precedence over doing.

Soon the snow in the picture above, from our backyard, will have squirrel tracks in it.  Then dog tracks.  The grooves of the familiar will wear it down.  Doing will once again replace being.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Because it won’t.

Going home.

 

Yesterday at dusk, with a quarter moon rising and the first few stars blinking to life, I stood on a hill facing northward.  Against the chill of November, not the faux cold of October but the real cold that rises from the ground,  I turned up the collar of my jacket.  My breath turned to little clouds and then disappeared.

I must have been directly under a landing path to Logan — miles enough away so I couldn’t hear the planes, but able to see them lining up.  Farther away, closer to the airport, they turned from mechanical objects to stars, blending, just before landing, with the other stars on the horizon.

The days when I traveled regularly are becoming a vague memory.  I now live a Mitford life, circumscribed by church, coffee shop, hospital, and homes to which I can, mostly, walk.

But as the planes turned to stars, I remembered that Friday coming-home feeling after being in a strange city and a strange bed.  From Detroit or Toronto or San Antonio or Chicago or wherever the gods of commerce had sent me.  I remembered the weariness from doing business, from making conversation, from negotiating, from haranguing and being harangued, and how the wheels of the plane screeching onto the tarmac was the sweetest of sounds.

I was home.

Home is always a stardust feeling, magical and bright.  Putting the key into the lock, coming in from the cold, bags dropping on the floor.  No longer a stranger in a strange land.

The sky got darker.  More planes turned to stars.  I whistled for the dog.

And we went home.

In praise of sauntering.

 

Our here in the burbs, it’s unusual to see someone sauntering.  Oh sure, I see people walking all the time — for exercise.  Walking for exercise is not sauntering.  Walking for exercise injects a grim determination into the act and creates the illusion that one is actually going somewhere.

However,  sauntering in my neighborhood is likely to get you arrested.  It is loitering’s second cousin.  In the burbs, sauntering is synonymous with casing the joint.

That said, I have had the chance to renew my sauntering — now that we are once again a dog household.  And the dog and I saunter in sanctioned space, conservation land not far from here.

(Quick aside:  Dogs deserve their status as our best friends for at least two reasons.