Well, seemingly in spite of some of our best efforts, Spring actually came.
The daffodils are starting to open. The hyacinths are pushing their way up through the dirt. The walking onions and strawberry plants in the backyard are really starting to take off.
And the best part is, none of this required a damn bit of effort on my part. It all just kind of happened on its own – the same way it always does…
Well, it’s that kind of day; the first of many I’ll have in front of me over the next few months. I weeded the garden, brought out the grill, and dug out the Russian Sage from in front of the house.
I grew up hearing, “Ya gotta eat a peck a’ dirt before you die,” and on days like this I’m probably wearing almost that much on my shirt.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that there’s not a whole lot of things in this world that a good dirt bath can’t cure…
By the time I was born, little remained of the coal mining industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Mid Valley region but skeletal breakers, ubiquitous culm banks, and the occasional rotten-egg smell of a still-active mine fire on the wind.
To some, this might sound ominous, or maybe even depressing, but for one particularly inquisitive child, who spent his days picking fossils and roaming the sparse Gray Birch copses dotting those same culm banks, it fostered a deep and personal connection with the Spirit of the place.
From the minute my bare feet left the linoleum and found themselves on grass and shale, I ran with it. I breathed it in, and felt its hand against my cheek in the mystery of every breeze. It offered something that the chaos of a household riven by alcohol, poverty, and emotional instability could not – it offered a deep and unshakable sense of home.
As I write these words, I am sixty-two years old. Many years ago, I traded the culm banks and Company houses of a small Northeastern Pennsylvania borough for the stockade fences and manicured lawns of a suburban vinyl village in Southern New Jersey, only to discover within myself a deepening sense of spiritual homelessness.
Fingernail Moon: A Coalcracker Looks for Glassboro, the first lines of which were written just a little over two years ago on an unseasonably warm February evening, are the result of a year-long endeavor to establish contact with the Spirit of another place, to make myself available to its idiosyncrasies and its graces, and if it so desired, to share with it a few of my own…
When you’re a kid growing up, you have certain expectations of what your life – what your immediate surroundings – are going to look like. You expect to be safe. You expect to be loved unconditionally. You expect there to be food on the table, stability in your home, enough money to take care of the needs that come up, whatever they might be.
But for some of us, it didn’t always work out that way – in fact, most of the time, it didn’t.
And those of us who grew up in households like that, where there was dysfunctionality or addiction – maybe abuse of some kind – we learned to come at the world in a certain way. We learned that the love that we received was conditional, and that we were always trying to be good enough to earn that love. And so, we learned how to please other people and act the way that they wanted us to act in order to give us that love.
And because of all that, we never really felt safe…
We’re currently in the aftermath of a pretty heavy snowstorm. We ended up with about 12 or 14 inches, and so, I spent most of yesterday outside shoveling us out.
Currently, the temperatures are rising, the sun is out, and the roads and the sidewalks are clean. In fact, they’re almost bone dry. But it’s still going to take a long time for what’s left behind to melt. It’s going to be a good while before we see any green poking up in the backyard.
Looking out at that unbroken field of snow, especially when it’s this deep and heavy, it’s very easy to feel the oppressiveness and the inevitability of it all.
Winter’s a time of dying off – a time of silence, of solitude. And that can be a little hard to navigate for some of us. It’s obvious that we live in a time that’s pretty oppressive. Things are coming at us left and right. They seem to pile up. The world can feel cold and heavy. We can feel alone and isolated.
But there’s another aspect to winter that’s important to keep in mind.
Yes, there is a dying off now, but it’s a necessary dying off. It’s the removal of the old things, the removal of the things that no longer serve. And as those things fall away, they open up space for new growth.
Yes, it’s a time of quiet, a time of slowing down, but it’s also a time of contemplation – of taking stock – of allowing the blessings that we’ve received throughout the year to settle into our bones…
I’m going to ask you two questions right off the bat:
“What are your gifts?”
and
“How are you using them?”
Y’know, it’s pretty obvious that there are forces in the world right now that are doing everything they can to keep us divided – to keep us at each other’s throats – so that they can grab all the power and control that they can. If you look at them closely, you’ll see that their actions come from a place of fear; come from a very, very deep wound. And the results of that wound have been pretty fucking horrific in a lot of cases.
But here’s the thing: in the midst of all of that, it’s also obvious – if you look – that a lot of us are starting to pull together, and come into the world from a place of compassion; a place of inclusivity and love.
Doctors. Artists. Musicians. Social activists. Politicians. So many of us are taking the gifts that we’ve been given, and carrying them into the world to serve the greater good…
We didn’t really get the crippling snow that a lot of people had this year. We had about eight or ten inches, but it had a crust of ice over the top of it, and because of the low temperatures and the high winds, it took quite a while to melt.
During the heart of it, it kept us homebound for a while, giving us time for quiet reflection, some deep spiritual work, and taking care of some things around here.
It’s good when those moments of solitude open up, especially when you make up your mind to use them. Those of us who learn to feel deeply when we grow up really need those times to charge our batteries, to rest up, to take care of ourselves, and to deal with a lot of things we couldn’t deal with when we’re in the midst of everything else that’s going on…
Those of us who’ve come up in households where addiction and emotional instability were the order of the day…we know a little something about grieving. We make a partner of our grief. We carry it with us. Often, we carry it down deep, where it hangs there like a feeling we can’t touch.
But sometimes, when we’re tired – when we’re triggered – it can come rushing to the surface. And when it does, it’s good to simply be in the midst of that…
One of the hardest things to do — especially for those of us who’ve carried a lot of pain for a lot of years — is simply to sit with it. Sometimes that pain shows up as body memories, sometimes as emotions or old stories that seem to rise up out of nowhere.
They can get into our heads, start pulling the levers, and before we know it, we can start acting out into the world in ways that might not be too nice.
And then comes the aftermath…
Today’s a day for knocking out a couple of writing projects. Tomorrow and the day after, we’re looking at windchills of way below zero. That’s far too cold to be out in the shop, when all that stands between me and Siberia is a kerosene heater and drafty old garage door.
So, it looks like a few days of laying low and tending to indoor stuff.
Lately, I’ve really been leaning into letting my life do its thing. I was joking, just the other day, that being retired is actually my job. And after these last few years, I think I finally might be getting the hang of it.
When I was in the 9-5, I really liked having an agenda. It was good to know the what’s and when’s, so I could schedule things accordingly. Now the work is typically catch-as-catch-can.
I won’t lie; it took me a while to acclimate to the shift. Not that my last position was the busiest job in the world. I was a trainer, so there was a lot of hurry up and wait. But I travelled some of the most congested roads in the Metro Philly area, so my days often ended up being pretty long. And I ate up a lot of tires and brakes on that gig.
Now my commute is two small flights of stairs, and the only thing I need to replace is my worn-out bedroom slippers. To be fair, though, I’ve probably gone through 5 or 6 pairs since it all started…
Bonja the Bodger 