muted colors

Snow is falling this morning. No sun worship for the cat or for me.

The forecast says to expect only a few inches, but it looks like nature might intend to bless us with more than that. I shall pack my shovels and buckets of sand and salt in the truck before I leave, just to be sure I have the necessary bits as I travel today.

Funny how my search for a definition of my higher power seems to have faded into the background of the big news of my call to ministry. I spent no small amount of time and energy exploring what I think god might be, and how I might relate to said god, and then I got the lightning bolt thing and it all sort of faded in comparison.

The snow is reminding me that I can worship here in the morning. There is no sun to warm my face and make the cat and I blink in unison, but there is beauty just the same. Snowflakes are falling by the millions, sometimes they come in tiny little flakes and other times they lumber down from the heavens like so many little toy army men with handkerchief parachutes, big and round and white against the pale blue of the early morning dusk.

I can feel the tension in me drain away as I watch. The seem to rinse the stress from my body as they fall past me outside my window. It is as though I were standing in a shower of snowflakes and they were washing off dust and sweat and grime as they fall. I did not know I carried that much tension in the morning, but I am noticing it as it goes away.

It is a conscious act to relax like this, to submit, and let nature's metaphorical touch wash away the things that make me uncomfortable. Worship does not always happen like this for me, but I like it. I like relaxing onto the experience, to feel my body drop into a kind of altered state of relaxation, allowing the universe to be in control instead of me. It is a familiar feeling, but not one I generally experience in this context.

I know I have to go soon, to move aside nature's offerings so that people can come and go without walking through the snow and getting their feet wet. They will not look at this snow the way I am now. To them it will be a nuisance, a thing that makes walking and driving slower and more hazardous than normal. It will irritate them. It may well irritate me, too, as I drive from place to place, but I will try to remember this moment, the feeling of submission to the divine as I am joined with nature and the universe.