For the New Year 2013

Tuesday, January 1, 2013 • 8:15 AM • Winthrop, WA -- Bluff Street House

Happy New Year. I sit in solitude and silence looking out on a picture postcard landscape. Frozen, lacy tree branches arched over snow covered rooftops. Mounds of white lining a stillness. A scene that belies civilization and community. I am surrounded by a quiet, punctuated by sounds of clocks ticking and old house creaking. I wait here, as if on the edge of a precipice, knowing my ninety-year old mother will wake soon enough and call out to me from her bed. Then the demands on my attention will be off and running for the day.

But right now, all is as settled as a winter pond frozen dark with deep ice, glazed with flurried frosting. I feel as a blank slate, not only the day, or the year ahead, but also my soul, waiting for the hand to write something. To write the word. The Word? What is “the word made flesh?” I’ve gone separate again from a warm faith, stumbled off path, into thick forest. 

I do not feel lost on a side-road, only muddled and without compass or direction. GPS not working in my currently unwired wilderness. “Will I ever get home?” Peter Yarrow sang in the seventies. Home is not Kansas. Nor angst, nor free-floating fear, nor depression, nor manic activity. Home: A place or a feeling? I am without answer as the sun colors the uppermost tree branches a pale gold in the frozen scene out my window. 

Wander on….