When all is right with the world

The storm is coming; the little icons on the weather page have snowflakes all the way through Saturday. But it’s a tough forecast, and the snow totals keep changing. Last night it was 8 to 12 inches, and 50 mph winds; today they say only 3 to 5.

One winter we had no snow at all, and this would have been a major event. Now, though, I’ve gotten greedy.

I want another foot, crazy as it is. A big snowstorm makes everything seem right with the world. This is the way it is supposed to be. We are creatures of nature; we are not its masters.

Birds, coming back

Next year I’m going to try to notice when the birds stop singing in the morning. Some days, in the dead of winter, are there no bird sounds at all?

They’ve come back now. It sounds like spring. Even the light on the snow looks a little bit like spring: a mounded-up snow pile drenched-in-cold-rain sort of spring.

Other people are happy about this. I love spring too, but in its good time. A big snowstorm, as my daughter observed the other day, helps us give up our illusion that we can control nature. We curl up inside, make a fire. The storm gives us permission to read a book, or take a nap.

In spring, there’s the garden to turn over, seeds to plant, exerting our will on nature all over again.

I like the birds and the light, but my will to control is still resting. I’m hoping for more snow on Thursday.

On an East Wind

The snow is coming in on an East wind.

Tina and I had to take turns being the East Wind, since there were only two of us. We’d build the wall first, taking the bamboo and ivory tiles out of their delicate drawers. Then the East Wind broke the wall, and we’d choose our tiles, lining them up in front of us like standing-stone paintings. One year we played all day, and when the call came in that school was closed again, we played all the next day.

I think Tina still has that Mah Jong set. I’d like to import her here today, as the snow falls.

Containers, Part two

A long time ago, when I wrote here about containers, my true-atheist friend told me she didn’t really understand what I was talking about (her atheism really doesn’t have anything to do with this, but I like referring to her that way – it contains her, so to speak).

In psychotherapy there’s a lot of talk about containing anxiety – you can pour it all into an addiction, for example (and then maybe get anxious about the addiction, but at least you’ve forgotten the original, perhaps existential, source). In group work, the facilitators have to make the psychological environment “safe” for the participants so they don’t freak out if someone expresses a scary emotion (hence my ability not to cry, even if someone else is sobbing).

Recently my daughter, whose job keeps her from visiting us very often, bitterly and justifiably complained about my habit of keeping a book on my lap while talking to her. I wasn’t really reading it, I said, but she was right: I was just like one of those annoying iPhone people whose laps keep calling.

Reading is my container – it’s an escape. It’s also a habit, continued even when I don’t want to escape, like when I’m talking to my daughter.

But one of the best containers in the world for me, and here we get to the prosaic point of this somewhat intellectual discourse, is snow. If I’d grown up on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, maybe I wouldn’t feel this way, but a major snowstorm here is an Event. It’s like getting wrapped in a comforter and ordered to stay home and read.

By now, after wasting an hour and a half last night following a local weatherman’s live chat (he’s as obsessed with snow as I am), I’m at the point of feeling disappointed when they say maybe only 5 inches.

But there’s always a chance the track will move west. It might intensify. The two jet streams might merge. It might be a blizzard.

Ah, yes. I’m so, so contained.