I can hear the sound of the clock from across the room. It’s near 3 a.m. and I can’t sleep. I am tired, but my mind is too full of yesterday and tomorrow to turn off and let sleep come.
I grudgingly pad downstairs without turning on the hall light, on my way to seek a nostrum in a house cooled to the low 60s. I regret not wearing my slippers. My feet feel the cold, even on the wood floors. Without my robe I am shivering. I’ll make this nighttime sojourn quick and get back into bed, hoping that my insomnia cure will work.
The downstairs is filled with moonlight as I move to the kitchen to make chamomile tea, my remedy for a restless head and heart. As the kettle warms, I wander back to look out the windows and I’m captured by the beauty of the cold and snowy landscape. The yard is full of snow, almost two feet, more in those places where the wind has moved it from somewhere else. It is breathtakingly beautiful, covering the leftovers from the fall and my diminished enthusiasm for raking. The decaying metal on my beloved arbor seat is no longer visible. It’s now enrobed in a marshmallow softness. Scattered remnants of my fall leavings have disappeared.
And the moon – it sends shadow traceries of the trees tumbling over the white canvas of snow. Their shapes and flow are lovely – paintings in black and white. There are accumulations of snow nestled in the arms of the Japanese Maple and the Crabapple that rival any artist’s depiction of winter.
I am now able to see other things that are usually invisible: the tracks of tiny birds and woodland creatures like pesky squirrels and the opossum that I know lives near here. There is secreted wildlife here that engages in its nightly perambulations without our awareness in this other world lit beautifully by the moon.
Up on the hillside, there are deer tracks and our cats have added to the panoply of signs on the snow, leaving clues to the continuing mystery of where they go.
But there is also the quiet that snow cover brings that allows other sounds to arise, some in whispers as I hear the sound of the kettle calling – make tea.
I hold the steeped tea in the warm cup and return to my view of the lovely night lesson … remembering that this is the basic truth of the earth. The planet, fixed at an angle to the sun, arranges for the weather and the flora and fauna to have the appropriate dance that maintains life. In the tropics, the dance is daily, all of the plants and animals using the energy of the sun to maintain the overflowing effloresce of life. But here, in the temperate regions, the plants and animals rest, leaving the energies stored in leaves and detritus to become part of the earth again with the melt of snow to nourish next year’s growth and harvests.
Sometimes I think that we have become like the tropical rainforest, busy all the time, absorbing and using energy so that there is nothing left for the soil that strengthens our lives or soothes our souls. We need to be more reflective of the temperate areas of the earth … to find a way to be like this lovely, almost magical night of shadows and footprints bathed in moonlight, the rhythm of the earth’s rest, so that we can better face tomorrow.
I need to take some of my own advice, which may just be better that cold feet and chamomile tea.
