Snow.
Both Saturday and Sunday mornings I awoke to see through the bedroom window the world below covered with a dusting of snow. Hardly enough for a shovel. Dry and light enough for just a quick sweep. Like manna that would melt and evaporate by noon.
I've watched enough Weather Network to click right away in my mind into some of the science of this scene. Even without the TV on I picture the isobars drawn like ocean waves across the map of southern Ontario, showing the ever-changing lines of the roller coaster we have been riding this winter of alternating Arctic fronts from the Prairies and the Canadian Shield, and warm centres from the American mid-west and the Gulf of Mexico. Can picture too the "Force of Nature" images from both the Prairies and the Maritimes of deep freeze and blizzards, and know that for other Canadians, snow -- even today, is more than just a dusting. Can't help but wonder about climate change and new weather patterns.
But before all that ... what was that leap in my heart when I rose from bed to see snow on the ground below when I looked out the window?
A welcome joyful stabbing of childhood memory. How could it not be for someone born in Winnipeg? (Which makes me wonder what different, equally sudden visions might awaken the child-heart of someone born, say, in Niagara, or in PEI, or in Australia.)
In the late '60's one winter Sunday morning I sat alone in my second-floor bedroom in Winnipeg, awestruck at what I saw out the window. The world was transfigured and beautified -- beatified, beyond measure and description. Hoar-frost, rare enough to be holy, coated everything I could see. Houses, cars, fences. Tree branches, power-lines, telephone poles. The beauty was unearthly and silent. All the world was held in hushed rest. It was suddenly not just Sunday but honestly and unmistakably sabbath -- feeling the meaning of that word in all my being even before I came to know it in my mind.
I took pictures. With my Argus Instamatic loaded with a drop-in cartridge of black-and-white film I tried to capture what I saw and felt. The pictures have survived -- sort of. The memory of the sight and the feeling has survived -- entirely.
And yes, I know snow can be a burden. It has to be shovelled and plowed away, and even I don't welcome that as much as I used to. It can make travel risky, and make vulnerable people housebound. It can tie up and shut down cities. It can create life-threatening and life-ending scenarios.
It is at worst dangerous, and at best inconvenient.
But maybe that's what makes me thrill to it as I do -- the inconvenience of it, the fact that we cannot completely master it, that we must bend at least somewhat to its presence and power.
Isn't that part of what we knew as children -- that mixed in with all that was handed to us by caring and indulgent parents, and all that we learned to master and bend to our own will, there was also something about the world that was bigger than our design, greater than our will, and more demanding of us than we could be of it?
The deep mystics of the ages speak of the holy as the mysterium tremendum -- that awe-ful, ultimately unknowable power of Beyond that in spite of its fearsomeness, also attracts us and compels us to want to draw near to it. And I wonder ... in our age -- with the world so flattened, commodified, demystified and trivialized, might the inconvenient beauty of something like the snow, offer us in its falling, a fading, awakening, silent echo of the holy?
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