STREAM OF THOUGHT

It's snowing today but the streams are starting to move in the woods and the great melt is on. This is the season not to trust the surface of things. Movement requires awareness or accidents happen...like my fall two weeks ago. Just a momentary lapse in attention and your plans can change on a dime. Ice can have a dusting of snow on top and though it looks like all the rest of the driveway, it 's dirty little secret could be a dreadful setback. I find myself shifting my focus. Winters at a ski resort are all about the surfaces of things. Our livelihood depends on snowy surfaces and groomed surfaces and surface smiles and smoothe surfaces and calm, collected customer service surfaces. As the sun warms and the snows begin to melt and recede I like to think of Winter as a dirty old man losing his grip on the young sweetness of Spring. She peaks out from under his tyranny for a day here and there and then a few in a row. Soon her gifts of warmth and growth draw a line in the sand and Winter eventually gives up and goes away.

As I've been called to stillness for healing my knee, I've spent unusual amounts of time just sitting and putting ice on my wound. Where before my accident, I was a flowing conciousness, I now find myself more rooted...like the trees. The sugar maples are tapped and now begins the daily collection of sap. Stephen compares himself to a vampire...that that is what he feels like when he sets a tap to bleed the sap. I am tuning in to the movement of the sap within the trunks of all those maples. Mother Nature seems so well organized. Did she plan on the movment of the sap concurring with the melting streams in the woods and the melting of what's been frozen inside our hearts? In so many ways, there is a beautiful order to the turning of seasons that we humans can become alienated from by our technological gadgets and work lives that require us to spend huge chunks of our lives inside. This incredible gratitude for the graceful order of things seems to be awakening in my heart at the same time Japan is suffering the devastation of the mega-earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis. Where Japan is sadly aware of the backlash of an angry earth, I am suddenly becoming concious of how mostly, the laws of nature are deeply dependable if one is willing to delve beneath the surface. When I was younger, I was mystified by the mysterious contradictions of nature. How could you trust nature's order one day and the next, be holding back the dyke of a once in a lifetime flooding? Is Mother Nature a schizophrenic?

It has taken a woman's lifetime to bring me to my present awareness...including the journey of menopause. There is something deeply connected about the paradox of Mother Nature and her seeming indifference to the human animal and the aging human female. There is what we know and what we show...and then there is the part of ourselves that is becoming...the molten lava under the surface crust that shakes us to our core and demands we change or die. I no longer puzzle over the duality of her appearances...or my own. I've stopped asking ..Why? I have reached a time of my life where it is enough that I finally begin to accept that every living thing including Mother Nature and myself, has a shadow. There is a dark side to every light side. And this recent accident...though a cause of great moans and frowns from me...has forced me to begin writing on a regular basis. Smile. There is a light beneath each darkness. Tommorrow is my cousin Sharon's 53rd birthday. On Saturday the moon will be full and the family will gather to celebrate and honor her too short life. The circle will gather...in body and spirit and in the darkness of our sad hearts, a great Light will shine. My conciousness can find peace in the dark and light of all things...and rest in knowing it is all good.