A Deep River Year
February 26, 2014

When I woke up yesterday morning, the dream was still fresh.  I carried it with me into the day, and even now the memory of it lingers.   Perhaps it is the color of the irises, blue as a late spring morning, that filled my waking vision.    They were everywhere, in bunches and mounds, surrounding a friend who was suffering a grave illness.   The illness was there, too, in my dream, perhaps an illness unto death.   But those glorious blue flowers seem to be a sign of some hopefulness, some beatific presence in the midst of the doom.

Something like this happens every year, in late winter.   These frigid, colorless days, end on end, create a kind of sensory deprivation.   I begin dreaming in technicolor.  Even awake, I imagine the world in hues of May:   great clusters of purple lilacs filling the air with their heady scent;  huge peonies unfolding, glowing pink in morning light; golden sundrops waving in the breeze;  and the unmatchable blue of those Siberian irises.    I could swim in it.    Perhaps the thing I feel is the allure of life itself, poised and prepared to erupt someday, but for the moment invisible beneath the layers of granular ice and grit that still cover our landscape.

At the end of the day yesterday, I came home and smiled at the oil painting hanging in our front hall, an image of an old Midwestern farmer standing in a bed of irises, his house a faint dream of a thing behind him.   It was painted by a west coast artist, Marilyn Lowe, and entitled "Another Spring."  There is a sadness in the farmer's face,  and I wonder if it is because he is alone amid such beauty.   Or perhaps the house in the background is his dream--a yearning for home, for a place of belonging, an assurance that love is just as real as those blue irises. 

Blue Irises

Hungry for warmth, for life,
I dream color
into this barren season
which is bereft of it.
Here and there
the snow pulls back
from the edges of roads,
and something resembling green
hints at life.
I look hard, wait for a brave
green tip or bud to appear.
I lean toward Spring.
And at the edges of sorrow,
amid the dull weariness of pain
or regret,
I try to remember
a day of irises,
a glorious tapestry in blue,
bright as heaven,
and hope a little.

-Timothy Haut, February 26, 2014

A Deep River Year
February 19, 2014

February is the shortest month in days, but it feels so long.   Everywhere the piles of frozen slush and snow have grown higher and higher, and people are weary of winter.   Perhaps it is because the days are  both cold and colorless, and because--if there are portents of Spring around us--they cannot yet be seen.   It will take a good melt, but then the little snowdrops will rise from the detritus of winter, and soon after the purple crocus will push into view, and it will be time to cut the pussy willows.

For now, we remember that this is winter's last hurrah.    And what a hurrah it has been.   Snowfall after snowfall, and icicles hanging from the eaves, and deep paths out to the birdfeeders, and treacherous walks where the snow has melted and frozen and melted and frozen again.  After last Saturday's snow, I grabbed a shovel and headed out to the driveway to clear the car.   I have warned Phyllis many times about the step near the corner of the barn which catches the drips from the corner of the roof--the "widow maker," I call it.   This time, I forgot.   My feet when flying out in front of me and as I saw the pattern of branches directly over my head, I felt the ensuing  crash happen in almost slow motion.   I remember thinking to myself, "This is not good.   This will not end well." 

It did not end well, though not as badly as it might have.   There were no broken bones, no blood.   In my fall, I landed on the back pocket of my jeans, right where I carry my cell phone.   As I lay on the ice, I fished out the cracked phone which was of no use to call for help, if I had needed to.    Only later, in the house, could I admire the large purple bruise spreading over my backside.    Yesterday it started snowing again.   I wait for pussy willows.

Ice

This crystal, bright-shining thing

diamond-hard, alive,
builds its beautiful prison
on stem and leaf,
glares hard from earth
that waits to soften , breathe,
wear some greener garment.
Long shards dangle from the edges
of our sheltered world,
say, "Beware,
you who step
into this bitter loveliness."
We are tempted by things
that sparkle, shimmer,
flash with radiant light.
But who would choose glitter over grace?
So we should be wary
of all cold and callous glory,
seek instead a tender way to be:
easily bruised, or broken,
yet alive,
a leaf in waiting,
a sign of Spring.

--Timothy Haut, February 19, 2014

A Deep River Year
February 12, 2014

It is two days until Valentine’s Day, and we will be braving the winter weather to go to a party at a lovely old house on the Connecticut shoreline.    I will be wearing the tuxedo we found at a consignment shop several years ago.   It happened to be just my size, but even at that I was reluctant to purchase it.   “When will I ever need to wear a tuxedo?” I asked.   Well, as it turns out, on Valentine’s Day of 2014, and any number of other occasions where it is just fun to get all dressed up and remember how lovely life can be.      I even learned how to tie a bow tie (no clip-ons for me any more) and I ordered a beautiful, big red patterned crimson tie for this occasion.   

We need such graciousness in our lives from time to time.   It seems especially fitting that Valentine’s Day falls in the middle of February, when it feels like this season of cold and snow will never end.   We are imprisoned in gray and dirty white, stone and cold, and, at the same time, by the awareness of how cold and lonely our world can be.    So the legend of the original Saint Valentine emerges from a prison, too.   Nobody is sure who the real Saint Valentine was.   Some say he was an early Christian martyr who died in prison for his faith, but not before he cured the jailer’s blind daughter and left her a loving note signed, “Your Valentine.”     Relics of his body are all over the world.  His bones are claimed by churches in Poland and Italy, France and the Czech Republic, in Dublin, Ireland, and even somewhere in Missouri.    But the truth is that all these centuries later, he belongs to all of us.

We nod to him with gratitude this Friday, send cards and flowers and chocolate, and wear tuxedos and red bow ties to parties.   We write our notes from the prison of this continuing winter because if it all ended right here, right now, the only thing we’d want to leave behind as a token for people to remember  us is our love.

Love

Sometimes love is light
As a leaf carried by a breath of wind
To dance across the snow,
A remnant from the heart
Of tree, of earth, of sun—
This lovely sigh of a thing,
That makes everything more lovely.
Sometimes love is heavy
As stone
Enough to break the heart
Of tree, of earth, of sun,
A borne burden, an ache,
A song that keens at death, or loss,
A lever to move a mountain.
We shall find this love,
We shall.
It is what makes life,
And breaks it,
The thing we must find or die.
We would do anything for it.
We carry it into the darkness,
Into the fire, the flood,
Into death to nothingness,
Or perhaps, to the dancing place.
Mostly, it carries us.

--Timothy Haut, Feb. 11, 2014

A Deep River Year
February 5, 2014

Sunday was Groundhog Day, and here it was overcast for a while before the sun broke out.   Traditionalists interpreted that to mean that winter will endure a while longer.  But I don’t need a groundhog to know that.   Winter hangs on in New England, with fits and starts, through February and March until some soft and unexpected day when the skunk cabbage push up through the mud and the peepers start their night song.   But we are a long way from that.

We awoke to another winter storm this morning—the second this week.    There is a certain resignation that seems to take over at this point.    The school district didn’t even decide to wait and see how this one might turn out.  They called off today’s school sessions yesterday while the sun was bright and warm.  And this morning the streets were completely quiet.   Not even the usual snowplows had begun the task of clearing the roads.

So my morning routine of walking the dogs at dawn became a surreal adventure into the mystery of winter.   Slogging through the deepening snow, we had to make our own path through an unbroken expanse of white, which seemed to be under, around, and over us all at once.    And then I became aware of the silence, and the fact that there was no wind at all.   This gift will not last.   But, for the moment, the stillness settled softly, like snow gathering on shoulders.

February, Stillness

The wind chimes hang still
Unmoved by the breaking light
Or the cascade of snow
Filling the earth.
Winter often prowls like a beast
Slinking through stones and bushes
And  lurking around forbidding corners,
Its breath icy with the otherness
Of sea and stars.
I walk north, feel the sting and bite,
Then finally turn my face homeward,
My back to the wind,
Pushed on by its force
Hard against my legs and heart.
But then a morning comes
Still and silent, breathless,
And wonder comes, and gratitude,
That for a while this winter morning
Is pregnant, waiting for something--
A different breath, perhaps--
To stir again,
Like a song.

--Timothy Haut, February 5, 2014