The Quiet Cold Night

I am in a strangely content place: quiet but wanting to stay connected. A little world weary, but wanting to stay informed. Smiling at the twinkling lights of the season, but avoiding crowds of shoppers. It is, with wind chill, -15 C. Still, I bundle up late at night and go walking on the deserted streets. The sound of my boots crunching on snow take me back to walking home after choir practice as a teenager, alone in the cold star-lit darkness.

I love the impersonal nature of the cold, the way it needs to be taken into account (if we are to avoid losing fingers or toes) but does not require that we take a position, make a judgement, label it "good" or "bad." It helps me feel my smallness in the vastness of what is. It teaches me not to take things personally, even as I consider what response I can make that is needed and sustainable. It teaches me to be here. ~Oriah I may have shared this photo by Karen Davis at Open Door Dreaming before. It conveys that sense of the splendid vastness that I feel out walking in the cold at night.