Looking out my sliding glass door at the Allegheny River and its expanding shoreline I have evidence that January 2022 is one of the coldest Januarys we’ve had since we moved here in 2005. Snow covers the river almost halfway to its middle, resting on the ice that has formed there. The pristine surface looks inviting, but we know better than to try and walk on it. Downstream a few miles there’s an island called Washington’s Landing where it’s said that the young British surveyor George Washington, (later our first president) was pulled from the frigid waters where he had fallen in, attempting to cross on what he thought was a frozen river. So, it’s not been that cold for that long.
It is the persistence of the cold, and as we’re coming up on the third year of the Covid 19 pandemic, it’s the unrelenting nature of our stresses that wear us down. The finish line keeps moving so it’s hard to pace ourselves. Winter is a time to go inward and stay close to the fire, to engage in indoor writing projects and household tidying which I learned to enjoy doing, but it’s hard not to have some respite. We view the weather forecast eagerly each evening, hoping to hear of some warming trends. Online with people from many other parts of the country–we’re all shivering, so there are few places to escape to, even if we could move about the country freely.
We had a visitor to our neighborhood hanging out in the trees near our house last week. He’s a relative of a visitor that saw for the first-time last January. His large-scale wingspan has had us keeping an eye out for our little white dog, and not mourning too intensely the rabbit he killed that we uncovered in the mounded snow. Last year we consulted the bird sanctuary and learned that his dark cap and brown and white stripped breast identified him as a Juvenile Red-tail Hawk, (which is how we know he’s not the same one. They don’t keep their unique markings that long.) We’re hoping the word is out that we’re a good place to stop on the Hawks winter flight path, and maybe the bird seed we leave out helps too.
A giant teacher in the meditation world left us this week, the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. That, and the frozen white landscape, remind me of one of the most important messages that winter sends us. The cold reminds us that this is a time to slow down and catch up with ourselves and our inner world. The monk’s directive– “Drink your tea slowly, reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole earth world revolves–slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.”
