resurrection tuesday

I've had a cold for about a week now.  It's kept me from enjoy long walks in the snow and may be the reason I haven't reached enlightenment.  I was ready, you know, to become a truly amazing creature, full of wisdom and compassion, but then I got this cold.  I'll have to take a rain check on enlightenment, I'm comfortable enough to talk a walk.  There's jazz playing this evening in Lamaeng.

Finally: Winter (my kind of Winter)

When you live in Ostwestfalen, you get used to Winter being a gray, damp thing.  Overcast days are the norm, the Sun is a rare, but welcome visitor.  For the last three days, we've had snow on the ground and temperatures hovering around zero on the Celsius scale ( 20s and 30s for the Fahrenheit Folk).  For me, it is finally Winter.  It probably won't last long, not like the November through March snowcover I remember from my childhood, marching down the mountain through a foot of the stuff to serve the 7 o'clock mass or marching back up it after school, walking on the iced over Rushbrook Creek (pretty good redundancy factor in that name) and falling through up to my waist, or weekends on Boot Pond with cousins testing the temerity of the ice with large rocks, which eventually dropped said cousins into the water.  Skiing from the top of the mine road across US 6 and down the hill to Rushbrook Street, sometimes narrowly missing traffic, sometimes so close to it you ended the run with your buttocks as a brake and went out of control into a hedge or a ditch.  But that was Winter, my way.

There were deer hunts when the entire forest was so quiet you could hear the animals breathing and the snow falling, so quiet the meditation took over and the hunt disappeared.  Long walks through mountain meadows and stands of pine opening into sparse hardwood and finally back down low on the mountain to the empty expanse of rock and dirt and giant shovels of the strippings.  John O'Hara once said that Winter in Scranton is suicide weather.  Maybe, if you're a city kid, but for us mountain boys, Winter, 15 miles Northeast of Scranton is transcendtal weather.  The same thing applies here, the lanscape and the cityscape transcend the gray with a coating of white and air which turns your breath into steam.  It's a good thing. It's my kind of Winter.

Walking in the Rain

I just came back from a walk around town.  Understandably empty, given the holiday and the weather, it was a pleasure to be able to have it all to myself!  I walked for about an hour, and given the weather-worthiness of my gear, remained dry, with the exception of the tip of my nose (something which only the largest of umbrellas could protect, given it's expansive nature).  There were a few pockets of teen-aged rebellion hunched under the protective cover of doorways, and one or two other intrepid cobble-stone wanderers, but none of the usual pigeons or beggars.  There's always a possibility that you've gone through a portal when the landscape is so devoid of humanity, but I think it was as I said, a case of weather and the aftermath of New Year's Eve celebrating.

Back on Steinstrasse, warm and dry within my cocoon, coffee brewing and a big chunk of tiramisu waiting for the wolf, I am reminded that the original child remains. 

Welcome 2013

New Year's Day is a time when many people make resolutions to stop this or that, to be this or that, to do this or that, and in a few weeks time, they've forgotten all about it.  That's okay.  It's raining, anyway, not the best weather for changing the world, but, I've got to do it anyway, so, this being the 66th time I've been around the opening of a New Year, I say hello to this one and I wish it a very healthy existence, as I wish all things with live in this world and in the ones I'm not privileged to visit on a daily basis. I resolve to continue.  That is my New Year's Resolution.  I will continue until I've got it right and no longer need to do so.  Then, maybe I'll continue just so I can drop a hint now and then to other beings who've had the same sort of convoluted journey that I've had.

I'm not a theologian, nor a nuclear physicist, but I know enough about both spheres to realize they are one and the same, in the same way that anything which seeks to explain nature is the same thing.  I've really enjoyed the emergence of quantum physics into the mainstream of thinking and being these past twenty or thirty years.  The deeper our knowledge of the natural world gets, the deeper our understanding of the supernatural world gets.  Super becomes sub and sub super in many respects.  In a sense, it all comes down to perception.  We can now see things we couldn't see before, neurons, galaxies, universes, quanta.  The more we see, the more we are led into the recursive world of vortexes, imaginary and otherwise, which gives us the ability to create, understand, teach, and learn some more.  I like it.

The world didn't end with the Mayan Calendar.  Or maybe it did.  Who cares?  I'm still imagining and perceiving and, yes, since it's Winter, eating.  That's a Happy New Year.  I hope yours goes as well!