In The Bleak Midwinter
(If you can handle the hygge, pop to the end of this post before reading it, and hit “play” on the song. Then scroll back up here and commence to reading. You’re welcome.)
No one has been “officially” sick here all winter so far, and I am well and happy in the soul-of-my-soul, praise be.
But winter still begs for stocks and soups - heavy on the garlic, with garnishes of gremolata or pesto, and lots of those tiny datalini pastas.
I love a cashew pesto garnish on a hearty Italian chicken soup
Soup is perennial tonic, but winter soup is its own thing. Revelatory. Layered with flavors and February colors, it’s as contemplative as it is nourishing. It murmurs its love when it bubbles in the copper stock pot.
There’s “The Nurturer” living inside you and me, my friend, and cold rain in February is her jam. Let’s let her out, these next four weeks, for she knows how to winter well. She doesn’t even need paintbrushes or art journals. She just needs people to love.
She needs bellies to feed and friends with whom to share stew.
As we softly step past the Celtic celebration of “Imbolc”, gathering daylight as we go, we dare not waste the brittle cold, nor set our heart on days of false spring. For they are but shadows of the substance that is April and May. The goal is to say goodbye to winter 2023 having done the dang thing. No regrets.
So. Let’s allow The Nurturer to gather her spices and conjure her broths. Let’s watch her build fires using our own hands. Light candles. Sit idling with flames and little children. Stare at stars, while wrapped in blankets.
The Nurturer is as rooted and she is wild and wide. She’s just as creative, and I’d dare to say more so, than any other kind of artist.
May you be well, this February. May your month be filled with the satisfaction of a walk or two in the stark freeze, and the joy of kitchen-ish things.
Because never trust an artist who rarely cooks for her people.
Hot Days, Hot Girlfriends, and The Middle of the Middle of the Middle
It’s Wednesday. Not only is it Wednesday, it is June 15th. It’s the middle of the week of the middle of the month of the middle month of the year.
Today is the middle of the middle of the middle. It’s the middliest of the middle. In my mind, this is significant.
The “feels like” temperature was over 100 degrees this afternoon. The purple basil, once flush with fresh leaf and blooms I had to pinch back every day, is looking a bit wilted and bedraggled. I hear my grandkids outside my office window, bouncing a basketball in our culdesac as The Preacher cheers their attempts and the sun sets.
In the hot, tired middle, we who are in it need retooling, desperately. After all, we have probably experienced sickness, difficulty, even betrayal, and our wide-eyed innocence is as wilted and weak as purple basil in a hundred degrees. I don’t know about you, but I have gotten older and wiser, and I’m just not mature enough anymore to shrug off cynicism. I have to avoid it. I even have to push back on it, everywhere I see it trying to languish my joy.
The tiniest consolations are as big a miracle to me, now, as walking on water. This world is so rife with strife and war and pestilence, that a glass of iced tea with an Alabamian friend, the snaggle-toothed smiles of grandchildren, or field flowers in the scorching sun, all alike are tender miraculous mercies, not to be taken for granted. Noticing something small - granular, even - something centered in the day I am actually in, pulls me back from the abyss of apathy that so many others in their middle seem to have fallen into.
Today has been as hot as the hinges on the gates to hell, but the birds are still singing out there, delighting in the blue hour. Wildflowers thrive, and wildly so, because they’ve become acclimated to the weather that is, not the managed outcomes of greenhouse conditions.
The Preacher picked up some Chinese takeout for our supper tonight, because I had a magazine article deadline. (I can’t feel upset about this, when I’ve waited all my life to be able to say it!). Of course, I went for my fortune cookie, first. It said:
The one who knows enough is enough, will always have enough.
So, on this middle day of the week, in the middle of the month that is the middle of the year, I stop to say to my soul, “It is enough.” Every ordinary day is crammed with glory, springing up even from roots set in parched, hot earth.
And because “I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate”, tomorrow I leave for Birmingham, Alabama.
Van Gogh said that, and I partly believe it. Because something akin to “fate” crossed the paths of The Preacher and I, with these friends - Mark and Jennifer, pastors of Life of Faith Church in Birmingham. It all began with them being “friends of a friend”, but now I don’t know which friend is the friend of a friend, them, or the couple who introduced us. I reckon we are all each others dear ones, now.
And because I hate travel, and never engage it without a good reason, you could say I’m an adventurer by fate, not choice. Whether it’s Italy, Nashville, France, or Birmingham - it’s all the same to me. I’d rather stay home, but the love of God compels me.
As does the laughter of a good, southern preacher’s wife.
Me, thinking about 18-wheelers on the interstate
I’ll be back, come Monday.
Have a beautiful, middle evening. And then a beautiful weekend, this sweet middle-month.