A few last photos of snow markings and mysteries here -- first a leaf still firmly gripped by the stem, after a very windy night. Then a picture story from our front stoop, though we aren't quite sure of the plot. That's presumably the imprint of the tips of a bird's wing and tail -- but what are those five parallel lines? And finally a snow illusion similar to that familiar psychology print which you perceive as either an old or young woman. Do you see ridges or depressions? Then the switch to Daylight Savings Time came this past Sunday, and so did the switch from snow to spring, with a few days of melting, and icicle creations giving way to the first spring flowers. Before the snow was gone, the snowdrops were up and by yesterday they were starting to open. The next few days are predicted to be in the high 50s, so maybe even the snow on the north side of the house will finally melt. Spring is on the way! 
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 Last Saturday we were at Camp Friedenswald, for Open Table Mennonite Fellowship's first retreat. I was able to get out to the fen in the early afternoon and enjoy its winter garb. By evening the snow had started and it continued to fall through the night. Back in Elkhart county, many churches canceled their services. Ours went ahead as planned, with a beautiful view of snow falling in the peaceful woods, seen through the windows of the Nature Center (a memory picture rather than a photo, since I was leading worship). By the time we got home mid-afternoon, there was at least a foot of snow in the drive, and we had to shovel before we could pull into the garage. By Monday the sun was shining brightly over thick caps of snow on trees, bushes, and lamp posts. In other spots, the wind created contours. And yesterday I looked out at our backyard hemlocks, and found them full of glinting icicles, like a Christmas tree covered with tinsel -- but much colder! While some hung as straight as the icicles dangling from the neighbor's eaves, others had more intriguing shapes.       
Snow still prevailed as March began, now interspersed with thaws that gave us glimpses of snowdrops. One melting snow mound in mid-March revealed a newspaper buried in January. The plastic bag kept it dry, and its headline was still quite appropriate. A record setting winter indeed. In April, the woods and marsh by the dam still had plenty of brown, but also the calls of returning red-wing blackbirds, a sure sign of spring. It was a special delight to discover spring flowers and green new leaves pushing up through the mat of old leaves. 
 After the leaves fell, and the temperatures fell, and the snow fell. . . here we are in winter. Just a skiff of snow, but enough for abstract patterns on the sidewalk. And enough to provide a backdrop for the delicate patterns of this dried plant growing on the edge of the prairie plantings on campus.     
Midwinter spring is its own season Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot "Midwinter spring" seems like an appropriate label for these days, even though Eliot was writing about a warm midwinter in England, and ours is a spring that keeps slipping back to midwinter. Several batches of balloons blew into our back yard one day when the sun was out and the snow had mostly melted and the calendar declared spring had arrived. So I tied them on the birdfeeder in celebration of spring. The photo above was what they looked like the next day, March 21. Below there is a slideshow of the corner of our front flower bed where the snowdrop bulbs are planted. I took these about every two days between March 3 and 18, eagerly watching for the snowdrops as the snow came and went. And came and went. And came and went. Even with the sempiternal snow, the snowdrops lived up to their name! (If you receive this as an email, you may need to go to the actual website to see the slideshow. The cycle ends with a photo of snowdrops with white blooms). 
The view this morning, with the most recent dusting of snow. We haven't made it to "sodden by sundown" yet, though warmer temperatures are on their way.
 For the past few weeks I have been busy with the final stages of helping edit a collection of essays on Assembly Mennonite's history, too busy to get to my blog. With a warmer week, our snow is melting fast, so it is time to post these before they are completely out of date. Snow and shadows and such.   Check out the avian snow angel on the lower right in the photo above. A telephoto lens would have been handy, but I did what I could before the shadow covered it entirely. And below, the date on the paper is January 25. I found it this past Saturday, March 15, on the front lawn, after the massive pile up of snow it had been in for the past several weeks melted -- still in its plastic bag and quite readable. I thought it was an appropriate headline. We broke the previous record of 100 inches of snow back before the most recent six inch snow dump.  
Earlier this week, a rare snow serpent raised its hoary head in our front yard. Or perhaps it's a snowy version of a summer thundercloud, lit from behind. We still have plenty of snow on the ground, though next week's predicted warmer temperatures should keep it melting. Somewhere under the voluptuous snow below, there are snowdrop bulbs. I got curious about how things looked a year ago. The last four photos are from the front yard on February 17, 2013. There was a dusting of snow in the morning, but it melted by midday, and I found an eager-beaver dandelion in the grass, crocus shoots in the flowerbed and snowdrops beginning to bloom. A slightly different picture than we have this year -- those snowdrops are somewhere under the two feet of snow in the middle of the photo below. It's hard to imagine, but one day soon we'll be seeing them again. (This is called faith. Expectant faith -- a good thing to have any time of year.) 
from 2013 -- but we'll see this year's version once the snow melts.
Here's a mystery. Most of the tracks in our yard are easy to figure out -- the patterns of bird feet under the feeder, the rabbit crossing from here to there, the squirrel bounding from the maple to the feeder and back again, the cat that prowls the edges. But what is the story behind the photo above? Apparently one night a rabbit hopped out to the middle of the yard, danced crazily for a few moments and then lopped away to the protective cover of the privet. And then there's sunshine and shadow on snow, and the light-catching crystals of hoarfrost on dried plants. 
 Notice the tracks in the snow on the bird bath. Just before the photo above, the cardinal hopped across the bird bath, stopping now and then with its head to one side, looking for all the world like he was thinking, "Wait, something is just not right here." Snow and cold weather continues. Birds at the feeder are a bright spot in the day. The flocks of house sparrows are commonplace, but still I am glad to see them finding shelter in the green branches of snow-capped yew bushes below my window on a snowy day, while the sight of cheery cardinal red or the black cap of a perky chickadee gives my spirits a lift.The spiral of terra cotta birds on our back porch don't need the birdfeeder, but they seem to be enjoying the warmth of early morning sunlight nonetheless.       It snowed and it snowed and it snowed. And then, the next morning, January 6, the sun shone bright in a clear, cold sky. I chose to enjoy the warmth of our house instead of heading out with my camera, given wind chills of 40 below. Even so, there was an ever-changing show from our windows, with intriguing play of light and shadow and snowy shapes as the day went on.         
It's melting now, but earlier in the week we got snow -- nearly a foot of it, making patterns on the trellis and putting a cap on the bird feeders. Frost festooned the garage windows and the temperature fell below John's lower limit for biking to work. I took him in, since I needed the car later in the day, and the sun rose just as I dropped him off. It lit up a gauzy layer of infinitesimal snow crystals in the air, creating rainbows. Or would that be snowbows? I went over to campus to find an open spot for a photo and discovered a rainbow between me and the Music Center. I didn't go in to check for leprechauns -- there were diamond-tipped golden stems right in front of me. Later I went for a walk in the sunshine, enjoying the colors in the midst of all the white and the traces of those who had been out before me. 
Have mice taken up cross-country skiing? Or is this the trace of two friends out for a scamper?
We are obviously in the midst of March. Yesterday I was marveling at the way the daffodil stems had come up several inches over the weekend, and the way the crocus in my window well were starting to show colors. Another warm day and they might have opened up. Instead they are covered with a snug blanket of snow. I've had to look to grocery store flowers for my color. I'm not even sure what these are -- some kind of mum, perhaps. I'm delighting in their purple and green fire. And for contrast, a scene of snowy footprints after an early dusting of snow -- with an overlay of flower-like pawprints. 
 The labyrinth at Pathways Retreat I had a serendipitous discovery yesterday. I've begun reading Nature as Spiritual Practice, by Steven Chase, a book I expect to refer to again here. In his preface, he refers to a phrase of Gerald May, "the power of the slowing," saying that it means if we give careful attention to nature, it has the ability to slow us down to its pace. I was intrigued by the phrase, which resonates with what happens for me as I take photos and also as I work with them later. I googled it and discovered that it comes from May's book, The Wisdom of Wilderness. A quick online check revealed that neither the local library nor the nearby seminary had a copy. "Oh, well," I thought, and turned to getting ready for the morning's direction session. Later in the day, a friend asked me to ride along on a short trip to Kalamazoo, suggesting we could visit the Friends of the Library bookstore while we waited for her violin bow to be re-haired. They have a room full of a wide selection of books. I began perusing the Religion shelves, and there it was -- May's Wisdom of Wilderness, on sale for a dollar! So I've been sidetracked from the Chase book, reading instead May's vivid stories of his encounters with the Power of the Slowing, which he experienced as a vivid Presence, welcoming him, slowing him, and reconnecting him with all nature around him. One of his paragraphs jumped out at me as fitting well with this past week. Nature, I think, knows nothing of concepts of time or of the present. Nature--our own and that of the world around us--lives in Presence instead of "in the present." Rather than moving through time, it simply exists in cycles and successions:sound and silence, light and darkness, birth and death, activity and stillness, courting and nesting, eating and sleeping. Everything is rhythms. Everything is seasons. p 71 The rhythms and successions have been swirling this week -- from warm temperatures bringing along the snowdrops and, amazingly, a dandelion in the front yard, to yet another round of snowfall and the sight of birds at the feeder at Pathways Retreat this morning. The dandelion is a cheerful golden sunburst, and yet I realize I greet the snowdrops with delight, and the dandelion instead with a sense of "What? A weed, already?" As I slow down and reflect, this does not seem right. Each is what it is, and the dandelion's yellow is a welcome burst of early color, to be received on its own humble terms. Perhaps the Power of the Slowing will slow me further, enough to welcome that gold sunburst, and to wonder what became of it in today's snow. It's too dark to check now -- perhaps tomorrow.  Wednesday's snowdrops  Wednesday's dandelion  Juncos and cardinal under the birdfeeder this morning 
The snow comes and goes, and so do our tracks. 
The snowdrops in the front, coaxed out by 60 degree weather last week, blanketed by snow this week, today are again starting to lift their blossoms out of the snow. 
We traveled east for Christmas, spending time with our daughter and son-in-law in Pittsburgh and then going on to join a couple of my sibs and their families in DC.There was good family time, most of which I chose to enjoy without a camera in hand. This morning we were back in Pittsburgh before returning to Goshen, and woke to a winter snowstorm. The name of the coffee shop across the street fit the day well -- and we had a lovely brunch there as well. As we waited for the storm to move on through before heading home, I enjoyed the effect of the snow on the rooftops seen from Beth and Jesse's third floor windows. 
A house with a lectern?
Beth spotted this one, in the building next door.
Snowdrop blossoms, coming up through old leaves and a layer of snow.
Palmer continues his seasonal metaphor for the inner journey by turning from winter's dormancy to the paradoxes of spring. Spring is the season of surprise when we realize once again that despite our perennial doubts, winter’s darkness yields to light and winter’s deaths give rise to new life. So one metaphor for spring is “the flowering of paradox.” As spring’s wonders arise from winter’s hardships, we are invited to reflect on the many “both-ands” we must hold to live fully and well – and to become more confident that as creatures embedded in nature, we know in our bones how to hold them. The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring; these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love. But in the spring we are reminded that human nature, like nature herself, can hold opposites together as paradoxes, resulting in a more capacious and generous life. A Hidden Wholeness, p 82 - 3 
Above, a dead and decaying log -- filled with moss, lichen and tiny mushrooms. The close-up is below. 
New growth and a clematis bud, on last year's vine, and the remnants of a previous year's flower.
Silver maple keys and a Japanese maple seedling, on old bark chip mulch.
Dogwood blossoms, full of spring sunlight.
One seasonal metaphor for our life's journey begins with a childhood springtime, blossoms into youthful summer, transitions into a midlife autumnal harvest, and slowly fades into the wintry chill of old age.A lot of us find the journey more complicated than that, and that's another reason Parker Palmer's seasonal metaphor in A Hidden Wholeness caught my eye. He begins the cycle with fall as a time of new beginnings and the scattering of seeds -- very appropriate for someone working with educators! But then comes winter. The seeds of possibility planted with such hope in the fall must eventually endure winter, when the potentials we carried at birth appear to be dead and gone. As we look out upon the winter landscape of our lives, it seems clear that whatever was seeded in the fall is now buried deep in the snow, frozen over and winter killed. Many demoralized people recognize this “dead of winter” metaphor as an all-too-apt description of their bleak inner lives. Hidden Wholeness, p.82 
At some point in our journey, we encounter winter. Unexpected losses, disillusionment, discouragement, depression, anxiety, additctions...it can take many forms, and it can come more than once, leaving us feeling frozen and fenced in. Palmer himself came through a time of deep clinical depression, and knows that wintry feel well. Yet when we understand winter in the natural world, we realize that what we see out there is not death so much as dormancy. Some life has died, of course. But much of it has gone underground, into hibernation, awaiting a season of renewal and rebirth. So winter invites us to name whatever feels dead in us, to wonder whether it might in fact be dormant – and to ask how we can help it, and ourselves, “winter through.” Hidden Wholeness, p 82. 
(And just in case anyone is wondering, these photos are from last winter. There a a few small flakes flying as I write this, but full-fledged winter has not yet arrived in northern Indiana.)
I'm looking through the Creation section of the hymnal this evening, getting ready for worship at Faith House Fellowship tomorrow, and the first verse of All Beautiful the March of Days could have been written for today: All beautiful the march of days, as seasons come and go. The hand that shaped the rose hath wrought the crystal of the snow, hath sent the hoary frost of heav'n, the flowing waters sealed, and laid a silent loveliness on hill and wood and field. 
My eye was caught by snow sparkles and shadow, before I scurried back inside to wrap up in a warm afghan. 
I've been reading The Wild Places, by Robert MacFarlane, partly in honor of this month's emphasis on earthcare at church, but mostly because it looked interesting. In beautifully evocative prose, he describes his search for wild places in the United Kingdom, taking us through stories of history and landscape.
One of his first chapters is "Island" which tells of his visit to Ynys Enlli, an island off the coast of the Lleyn Peninsula, one of the remote places where Celtic monks took up residence. I like the glimpse he gives us into the life of the monks: Much of what we know of the life of the monks of Enlli and places like it, is inferred from the rich literature which they left behind. Their poems speak eloquently of a passionate and precise relationship with nature, and of the blend of receptivity and detachment which characterized their interactions with it. Some of the poems read like jotted lists, or field notes: 'Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent.' Others record single charmed instants: a blackbird calling from a gorse branch near Belfast Loch, foxes at play in a glade. Marban, a ninth-century hermit who lived in a hut in a fir-grove near Druim Rolach, wrote of the 'wind's voice against a branchy wood on a day of grey cloud.' A nameless monk, responsible for drystone walling on the island of North Rona in the ninth century, stopped his work to write a poem that spoke of the delight he felt at standing on a 'clear headland', looking over the 'smooth strand' to the 'calm sea', and hearing the calls of 'the wondrous birds'. A tenth-century copyist, working in an island monastery, paused long enough to scribble a note in Gaelic beside his Latin text. "Pleasant to me is the glittering of the sun today upon these margins.' A man after my own heart, that tenth-century monk. We were back to clouds and snow today, after yesterday's clear sunshine. The sun hadn't come up yet when I went over to the Rec-Fitness Center this morning. For being dark, it was quite light, with snow coming down steadily and holding the light from the campus lighting system. On the ground, the snow shimmered with a zillion shining sparkles, like a cloak of glittering sequins covering the sidewalk and grass. Though that's backwards -- the glittering sequins are like the glistening snow, which has the longer pedigree. The sparkles twinkled more rapidly as I looked down at my feet, and more slowly further away. And there were still a few random twinkles even when I moved through shadow. Snow catching the ambient light, I assume -- though when I came home again, day had arrived, and the snow was as dull as the clouds overhead. I'll have to ask one of my physicist friends or relations about that one. 
Fourteen hours on the road yesterday, traveling home from Kansas. There were many moments of light, like this sunrise soon after we started, and the sun-brightened fog that filled dips in the landscape. 
Others were harder to catch with a photo, especially from a speeding car -- stark bare branches in a glowing fog, the bright breasts of raptors perched on fence posts beside the road, a herd of maybe a hundred deer drifting through a bare woods and across a stubbled field (fortunately, quite a distance from the highway). Temperatures here were way down over the weekend, and back up into the 50's today. I discovered my snowdrops are up and showing a bit of white -- and by late afternoon, they were also surrounded by white. They should be fine, though -- they are called snowdrops for good reason! 
Many moments of light this weekend, but less time to turn them into blog entries. On Friday, I traveled with two friends out to Kansas for our 18th annual Joy Luck Club gathering. We met our friend, Christina, in Kansas City, Missouri, after traveling ten hours from Goshen, played some mah jongg in our hotel room and did some sight-seeing the next day before driving on to her home in Salina. It was snowing when we left Goshen, and we saw a couple remnants of accidents on the road near Chicago, so it was a relief to arrive safely. And traveling through Missouri, the combination of colors created by the late afternoon sunshine and golden dried grasses, brown branches, white snow, blue sky and blue shadows lifted my spirits. 
 Saturday we spent some time in the contemporary art museum in Kansas City. I liked the glass sculpture by Chiluly and its shadows.  And from a little farther away, I was intrigued by the way the artwork reflected in the floor. 
And this photo by Michael Schultz was a spark of light -- it's a photo of a decaying ammonia factory in Belgium,with green moss and ferns growing on the floor. I also like his quote above, which you may not be able to read: I believe the camera can produce an image that. . . enters a realm of heightened reality. It struck me as fitting well with what I'm doing with this blog.
I've been enjoying the sunshine streaming down the last couple days, though due to other commitments and the challenges of taking photos when the temperature is below freezing, I haven't been able to explore sun on snow as much as I would have liked. 
At least my spirits can be lifted by the sight of sun and snow from inside the house -- though the snow has been melting since this photo, as the temperatures climb into the 40's. Given that we are still in Christmastime, this 11th day of Christmas, I've been enjoying the way the sunshine brought out these traditional Christmas-y colors. 
And a different sort of spark of light --
On JRR Tolkien's birthday, January 3rd, Garrison Keillor included this story about him on his daily Writers' Almanac. Tolkien was a professor of English Literature at Oxford, and one day when he was grading exams, he found that a student had left blank an entire page of the exam booklet. In that empty space, Tolkien scribbled the sentence "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He went on to develop that into a story he told his children and, eventually, his book The Hobbit. I'm enchanted by this snippet. What if there hadn't been a blank page just then? What if Tolkien hadn't let his diligent prof-grading-exam identity drift away? What unsuspected delights might come popping out for us, if we find a little time and space in the midst of our everyday duties, and let our creative selves playfully scribble a mysterious sentence, a joyful doodle, a half-heard tune? 
Last night's snowfall and today's clear skies made for many light filled moments today, starting with sunrise in the parking lot. Then there was sparkling ice on fences and trees, full of beauty even when it weighed branches down. I spent more time knocking snow off branches than taking pictures, and the top of the arborvitae is no longer bowed down to the ground. Ice was everywhere. 
There's a large flock of sparrows that normally shelters in our privet hedge. The hedge was half its normal height even after John freed the branches from snow. While they slowly recovered, a portion of the flock settled in our locust tree instead, their wings catching the light as they landed. The geese, on the other hand, flew overhead, heading towards the sun. 
We got enough snow to stick last night, though it has melted by now. I spent the morning at Pathways Retreat Center, and was able to spend some of that time looking for sparks of light generated by melting snow and ice. 
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My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Categories
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