silence Archives - Letters from the Parsonage

February 21, 2023 No Comments

photography of leafless tree surrounded by snow

I haven’t seen bare ground anywhere around here since December. It’s been a long, long winter. The last storm that I recall dumping this much snow was April of 2018, and then, we knew that it was likely the last snow of the season.

But when it snowed in December, then a foot or more in early January, I knew we had a long way to go yet. We had a short February thaw, a few days above freezing, enough to melt the ice dams and the gargantuan icicles that had formed on the corner of the parsonage. And now, we’re wearily awaiting the arrival of another foot dump of snow, just when the patio furniture was beginning to emerge from the drift it’s been encased in since New Year’s week.

We attempted a trip to Dell Rapids this morning for my physical therapy appointment to fix my frozen shoulder and abandoned just short of half-way. The first round of snow had already arrived, and visibility was deteriorating. But on the way back from the van, there it was: the clean hush of new-fallen snow. One of my favorite things about first-snows back when I was a child. That, and the way the sky glowed at night, once everything was covered. Out here, the glow isn’t as evident, since we’re no longer in a town, but the silence is still there, perhaps even more intensely.

The silence was a reminder to me that even in the middle of a long, weary winter, there’s still beauty to be found. And it was a reminder to me that the long silence I’ve experienced in my writing life just might have some beauty and wonder behind it as well.

I’m currently in a season of silence, surrender, and listening. Not much else to do, really. I start something, and it circles, wanders, goes back into something I’ve written already about a dozen times. And that’s where I generally quit. It all gets sucked back into the same rut, it seems, with no new epiphanies. So, I’ve held on to that idea of silence all afternoon.

My typical antidote for writer’s block is just doing the next thing, starting somewhere random and running with it, but unfortunately that’s led to about six months of wandering, circling, treading water. Maybe I haven’t been paying enough attention, I’ve thought. Maybe I need more margin in my day. Maybe I need to read more. Yet none of this has really helped me regain momentum. So, today, I’m going to focus on what’s right in front of me: silence. And maybe that’s just what I need, because it’s what I seem to have been delivered in spades.

Today, I’ll write about the silence, I thought. So, here I am. A foot and a half deep in the white, clean hush of winter quiet, listening for what comes through, trying to be patient.

The Week Between

December 31, 2019 No Comments

Somewhere in my travels through books and words I fell upon a two-word combination that’s stuck in my head ever since: liminal spaces. It’s a fancy way of saying the space (or time) between something. A quick glance at my dictionary tells me that it comes from the latin word for “threshold.”

As someone who’s lived through more transitions than I can count, whether that’s between addresses or between seasons or between phases of life, I guess it makes sense that those words would be a little sticky. So when I noticed several people around me mentioning the quality of these days between Christmas and New Years as a sort of liminal space, it made (and still makes) perfect sense to me. I feel it, too, this sort of letting out the breath held during Advent, just before the deep inbreath of New Years and setting back to work in a new year, perhaps with a new mindset and the cleansing feeling of having started anew. Yet, in these days between, there’s a heaviness of the year past, a time when things slow down and quiet and we’re given space to reflect –perhaps moreso, since this is not only the end of a year, but of a decade.

In a Midwestern winter, after a just-barely white Christmas and a few inches of fresh snow in this week between, the outside reflects the inside. Everything stills in the snow, and the bright frigid mornings seem to add to that clean, silent sense of space and openness. Here, there is space to let the weight of a year past settle into memory, and space to walk into the hope of a new year.

Some describe this week between as a letdown, a time when time slows, a time of fatigue and sleeping in and greyness –and I feel that, too. But I wonder whether that reaction is one of our culture, a culture which thrives on noise and busy-ness and fullness. Like nature abhors a vacuum, we resist these times of silent space. We don’t want to make room for silence, let alone have it handed to us in the form of a week with no agenda, with no parties to attend or tasks to accomplish.

But I really think this week-between is a gift. It’s a gift like the silence of snowfall: something that, as adults who see snow and think only of ice scrapers and shovels and snowblowers –who only see the work to be done to clear the way out– we forget. We forget the joy of playing in the snow, of lying on the ground in the middle of a fresh snow angel, listening. We forget when we focus on the past and the future and miss what’s going on in the moment.

Perhaps that’s the lesson of liminal spaces. Liminal spaces in nature are usually times of unusual beauty: sunrise, sunset, rainbows, the clouds building before a thunderstorm. They’re things we miss when we’re not paying attention. So, in this time-between, enjoy the silence. Pay attention, make room, and relearn the gift of the present.

Photo credit: “frosted sunrise” by c thomasson is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

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