The cold lingers. A friend texts about walking, proposed temperature 5 degrees. It’s a balmy 3, the sun dazzling on fresh snow. A year ago, I sat miserably in her car, hardly able to walk around the high school — did I manage that loop twice? This end-of-January, we walk and talk. Later, sprawled before my woodstove, revising a manuscript that my cat uses as a nest, twilight and then darkness press against the windows. I have not forgotten how easily a body breaks, how rapidly the world shifts from wellness to suffering.

The world propels through flux, and while I’m (at least momentarily) emerging towards fuller health, so much human darkness deepens. My college student daughter phones from Burlington — Vermont’s big city on our own Great Lake — the streets jammed with protestors. The mayor issues a statement as officials prepare for an ICE invasion. “Stay steady,” she urges.

Under the moon hanging in the sky, we head downtown to the coffee shop to admire photographs of the northern lights. The photographer plays a short film of footage shot in locations the audience knows well, roads and lakes and a ridgeline above the village. Turns out, he wrote the music, too, weaving in calling coyotes and chirping crickets, loon songs. It’s no antidote, no balm, but a radiant reminder of the vast universe, of how the horizon shifts from black to pink to green, that we are driven by love of beauty, too. A steadiness.

On Frozen Fields

1 
We walk across the snow, 
The stars can be faint, 
The moon can be eating itself out, 
There can be meteors flaring to death on earth, 
The Northern Lights can be blooming and seething 
And tearing themselves apart all night, 
We walk arm in arm, and we are happy. 

2 
You in whose ultimate madness we live, 
You flinging yourself out into the emptiness, 
You - like us - great an instant, 

O only universe we know, forgive us. ~ Galway Kinnell