[SB] Sabbath Blessing (a day late!)

[Molly Wolf]

Coincidence

It's pure coincidence, and a rare one, that we got our first real snow of 
the season just in time for the first Sunday in Advent. A nice coincidence, 
though. While it makes driving a bit nervous until we get our winter habits 
back, there's a satisfying feeling to this first snow, a sense of things 
falling back into place. Where I live, we live with snow (at least 
potentially) for about half the year; there's always the possibility from 
mid-November until mid-April. For us, snow is normal, although not nearly 
as normal as it is in, say, Iqaluit.

First snow, like First Advent, is a sort of new-year thing, just as the 
beginning of September is and the first of January isn't really, at least 
for me. Which is why it's peculiarly satisfying to have the two of them 
coinciding. It's a time to notice things differently -- for example, how 
the landscape turns monochromatic but also delicately detailed, as the 
lacework of bare trees uplifts itself, black against a pearl-grey sky. The 
light on the water is different, more steely. In the evening, as I stood 
outside for a long moment, I saw again for the first time this season the 
particular smoky-gold of city lights diffused, reflected, deflected by snow.

First snow, like Advent, is a quiet, reflective space. It has its sounds, 
of course -- the yells of kids having snowball fights or the unmistakeable 
crashing rumble of the plows, a comforting late-evening sound as I curl 
under my winter duvet with 14 pounds of heat-seeking tortoiseshell cat. But 
mostly snow seems to absorb noise, laying a stilling softness on the 
city.  It slows things down, too; we drive slowly and carefully (well, most 
of us!); walking is a very different matter when  the sidewalks are greasy 
with slush.  It means being particularly attentive and a little bit 
patient. Not a bad way of being, in Advent.

Of course people on the other side of the equator will have a different 
Advent experience, but perhaps noticing, being attentive, also comes into 
it -- being attentive for the height of summer and what that means to that 
particular landscape. I don't know. New seasons always tug at our sleeves 
asking to be noticed, as the tender buds of the fig tree -- the only tree 
in Jesus' landscape that lost its leaves in fall and grew new ones in 
spring -- asked to be noticed. .

But the only landscape I can make sense of is the one I actually live 
with.  What I notice mostly in this first-snow landscape is its simplicity 
and silence. Something about it seems both remote and surprisingly 
intimate. I move into snow season as I move into Advent, waiting, watching, 
in expectation that mystery will, in its own good time, brush its wings 
against the face of the earth.



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I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.