In December I read a charming little book called The Gnome Project by Jessica Peill-Meininghaus about how she decided to cure her lifelong habit of not completing projects by making one gnome every day for a year. No matter what! I wish I could tell you that I’ve decided to do the same thing ( I love gnomes!!), but I wouldn’t know where to start. Let the Peill-Meininghauses of this world handle that. However, I got to thinking that it might be a good discipline for me to do just one thing consistently every day for a year. So I picked going for a walk, taking photos, and blogging. Okay, that’s three things.

Today was another one of those so-cold-outside-and-the-wind-is-howling days that make it hard to keep up with this resolve. I enjoy being sedentary. And warm. Sedentary warmth is my happy place (I’d like to see that on an inspirational poster!). Dear reader, I went anyway.

Every day when I’ve been outside I see something worth capturing, something worth seeing and thinking about, something simple and beautiful. When I bring the camera and lift it to my eyes, it’s as if everything around me is shouting “Me! Pick me!”

I didn’t bring my camera today (I took the above shot right outside our back door). Too cold. But you can still see and hear what it was like:

The rhythmic “squeak, squeak, squeak” of my boots on the hard snow.
A lone tree in a snow-swept field holding down the fort.
Clouds scudding across the sky,
occasionally stepping aside to reveal a pale, impotent sun,
which, unlike its summer counterpart, I can stare at all I want
without burning my retinas.
Men out with their snow blowers, creating even more snow flurries.
Empty roads, lively winds, a moving veil of snow everywhere,
Heading back, pushing against the wind which feels prickly on my skin,
And the rhythmic “squeak, squeak, squeak” of my boots going up the driveway.

In honor of our winter storm, I want to share this delightful poem by Mary Oliver that I read the other day.

The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters.
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better myself.

Indeed!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Here’s how we look in Minnesota when we venture outdoors on a snowy, cold day:

If it were below zero, that would be way too much exposed skin. Cocooned like that, all you hear while you are walking is the sound of your own heavy breathing. The rest of the world is muffled and curtained; you can make up your own narrative as you go along, unfettered by the regular noises and distractions of the world. It is a wintry dream that holds you captive and sets a snowy filter over your eyes. It is a time to ponder the God who releases all of this from His vault and sends it with glorious extravagance. The trees hold out their branches and rejoice.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Let’s tell an inside story today. Behold, our “fireplace:”

I read a something in the Voice of the Martyrs magazine yesterday morning that has lingered with me in a powerful way. Gather around the “fireplace” with me while I tell you about it.

A man in Ethiopia became a sheikh. He had a zeal for Islam and an equally passionate hatred for Christians. This is all he knew, all he’d been taught. He said, “Ever since I was a young man, I wanted to persecute and even kill Christians. When I became a sheikh, it was my greatest priority.” Sound like anyone you know? If you’ve read the story of the apostle Paul in the Bible, you will recognize that he had that same unholy zeal, thinking that his persecution of the newborn Christian church was pleasing to God. His awakening came on the road to Damascus. But back to the sheikh, our modern Paul.

He went from village to village, leading groups of hotheads like himself. They sought out the Christians in those villages and burned their houses and burned their churches. And then this happened:

“One day we went to another village to burn the house of a Christian lady. I dragged the lady from her house. I beat her. I hit her so hard that I broke her arm. She began crying from the pain, but rather than curse me or yell at me, she said, ‘God bless you, my brother.’

“I was shocked. My heart was broken, and I cried for two nights. God had crushed me.”

He broke her arm, and God broke his heart. He was on the road to Damascus, my friends. He began to have dreams of Jesus and soon left Islam to follow Christ. And his former friends came and burned his house. Like Paul, he suffered the loss of all things, and counted them rubbish because he had gained Christ.

The beauty of that woman blessing her persecutor was as the beauty of the crucifixion when Jesus blessed those who nailed Him to the cross. She gave her pain to Christ and He redeemed it with a sheikh who truly became her brother.

I think back to when God crushed me, although not in quite so dramatic a manner. In the end, God must crush us in order to save us. And He will redeem what we have lost. He will take our pain and use it for His kingdom.

And we’ll live happily ever after. That’s how all good stories should end.

God bless you, my brother, my sister.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

It was 5 degrees and late afternoon by the time I was heading home from work. I wished I hadn’t committed to taking a walk every day in 2020, but there’s not much point in making a commitment if you abandon it at the first sign of inconvenience or discomfort. I’m not taking my camera with me, I thought – too cold. No outdoor photos today. And then I saw it in the sky – a sun dog! Sun dogs are God’s gift to us in the Northern Lands, much like the northern lights (which I’ve actually never seen). Here’s the scientific explanation:

“The sun dog is a member of the family of halos, caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere. Sun dogs typically appear as a pair of subtly colored patches of light, around 22 degrees to the left and right of the sun…”

Scientists take the fun out of everything. Here’s my explanation:

Sun dogs are rainbow pillars that flank the sun with rare beauty and can only be seen when the days are so cold that your eyelashes freeze.

I guess they can be seen anywhere in any season, but they’re most obvious in really cold weather and when the sun is close to the horizon.

I actually drove to a spot to get a good shot and then went home and took my walk without the camera. The sun dog was way more beautiful in person than in this photo.

Sun Dog Days
Will you dare to catch a sun dog?
Will you run to grab his ears?
His bark is fearsome frost,
His eyes like dreadful mirrors.
Oh, you’ll never, never tame him –
Just when you think he’s yours,
He’ll sink into the shadows
With icy growls and roars.

That about does it for today. I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens. I didn’t make that up, but I’ll bet it was a fellow Minnesota who coined it. These are the days that send many of our people scurrying to Florida or Arizona as fast as they can, not to return until March or April. Not that we’ve had the below-zero, skin-freezing temperatures yet – it’s been fairly mild, as winters go. All this snow and ice and wind scrubs us clean and scares away the kind of insects and snakes that are the sinister underbelly of the warm South.

I, ,too, went south today. We’re one of the last houses you pass as you leave our town heading south. In fact, as soon as you pass us, the street becomes a county road and there are wide, flat fields where e’er you look. I could tell that the sun would be setting soon and wanted to be free of the usual impediments to seeing it – all those bare-nekkid trees and bushes, all the clusters of houses. But as soon as I left them behind, I also left behind their shelter from the wind. The romance of getting a sunset photo got a severe slap in the face.

Winter Sunset Haiku
Red, yellow, orange
Warm colors, cold, distant sun.
My fingers are blue.

Cars and trucks whizzed by me and added to the ambiance, with their sounds increasing and then decreasing as they went by. It was a good sound track for my walk. I took a bunch of photos, but in the end, the one I loved the most was the one I took on our driveway when I was almost home. I passed a leaf standing proudly in the snow with the setting sun in the background and in a moment of dedication to the art that surprised me, I laid down on my stomach in the snow to get the photo.

Soli Deo gloria.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning…

Do you ever have delusions of grandeur? When I was in college, I learned how to play the guitar and used to sit in my room for hours playing and singing. I left the window strategically open so that any talent agents that just happened to be wandering by might hear me. I used to enjoy imagining the conversation if one of them came to our door:

Doorbell rings. Mom or Dad answer.
Agent: Hello, I just heard the most wonderful guitar playing and singing from your house. It was so lovely and mesmerizing, I just had to come up and see if I could sign that musician up for a multi-million dollar contract.
Mom or Dad: Are you sure you’ve got the right house?

That charming little scene never happened, but when I was visiting a friend of mine at her college, I spent an afternoon singing and playing the guitar in her dorm room while she was in classes. I took a break to go and get some food and ran into the janitor, an older man, out in the hallway.

Him: Was that you makin’ that noise?
Me: um… yes.
Him: I thought it was a somethin’ like a dog howling.

That really happened! Pretty embarrassing and awfully humbling. I think he was pulling my leg, but to this day, I’m not sure.

All these years later, one would think I’ve outgrown such nonsense, but today as I headed out for a walk, I decided to carry along my extra lens and unbidden, the thought came to me: people will think I’m a professional photographer! I blush even to write that. Today was definitely not a professional photography day for me and not a soul even saw me wandering around in the nature center. I ended up clumsily exchanging lenses after having to walk a bit to find somewhere to put the extra lens where it wouldn’t be in the snow (I bet professionals wouldn’t get stuck in that bind). While I was using the zoom lens, I wanted my regular lens. Just as soon as I switched to the regular lens (oh, my cold fingers!) I wished I had the zoom lens back on. I found out it’s confoundedly hard to take photos of animal prints in fresh snow – the camera kept saying “What? What are you trying to photograph? I can’t SEE it! Don’t expect me to focus.” And then I decided to experiment with all of the special effects that this camera has. Halfway through them I realized how dumb it was to use settings like “super vivid” “pop” (for color), “photo illustration,” “miniature effect,” “toy camera effect,” “selective color” and “silhouette” in a mostly snowy, colorless landscape.

Gah! All of my delusions of grandeur were no more than just some dog howling. But you get to see some of my photos anyway, including ALL the ones I took of a stand of trees using every single special effect. Please don’t unfollow me, although I probably deserve it.

I really might delete this in the morning – a higher probability than usual.

It was late in the afternoon when I started out on my walk today. As per my usual habit, I started taking photos as I went along, so in lieu of a lot of writing, I’ll just post some of those and let them speak for themselves, unless I’ve got something to say.

Little baby tree holding hands with Mom and Dad trees. That’s what I saw. And now, thanks to your imagination, you see it too.

I’m always keenly aware in the cemetery that all these dead names are living memories for someone else. Makes you think.

It was when I got the camera out to take the lone leaf photo that I realized that somewhere along the way, I’d dropped the lens cap. Rats. I took the photo anyway, and then followed my footsteps back the way I’d come, looking intently in the snow and frozen dirt for it. I got all the way back to the last photo I’d taken where I knew I’d still had the cap and didn’t find it. Double rats. I turned around again and there, just a few steps ahead of me, the cap was lodged in the snow and dirt. Double yay! I trudged back toward home feeling the cold nip at my face, but generally pleased with this little bit of kind providence. The sun was going down behind the gray clouds and streetlights and yard lights were coming on.

Another Sabbath day is coming to an end, and in my heart, I’m still singing one of the hymns we sang in church today:

God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year;
God is working his purpose out, and the time is drawing near;
Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be,
When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

Amen!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

Minnesota Winter
Beautiful and glorious, bracing and bitter,
Bright like the sun glancing off a million whirling mirrors,
Dull days of endless dimming, blending all together.
White, gray, brown, black, white again,
Crunchy, crusty, slippery, slushy,
Snowballs, snowmen, snow drifts,
Shovels, plows, ice picks,
Skates,skis, snowmobiles,
Cars spinning, swerving, weaving, ditch-bound.
All things dead, silent, resting, waiting.

And then, a crocus.

I did, in fact, go for a short walk on this beautiful, bitter cold day. But I didn’t want to bring my camera – too cold – so I took some photos in our back yard using a bright red jingle bell for contrast with the balsam fir (the much photographed balsam fir!). I used both of my lenses to see which would get the best shot. See what you think.

The first two were taken with the 18-55mm lens and the second two with the 70-300. I like the way the background is blurred with the second lens, but I also like the background in view in the first two photos. And then this happened:

Not sure what happened there, but I like it!

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

As I was looking upon this scene, Aragorn walked up beside me and murmured, “A great battle has taken place here.” Amazed at his ability to divine the things that had taken place, I asked him to continue. He walked around the two characters and studied carefully the markings in the snow and the position of the bodies. He lifted his head to feel from whence the wind was coming and closed his eyes in thought. After a time, he spoke. “The man of snow issued a challenge to the bearded man in red. They would face one another as contestants in the ancient dueling practice of limbo. The buoyancy of their bodies put them on an even playing field, but clearly the man of snow felt he had the advantage. The markings in the snow indicate that the man of snow went first, but a sudden burst of wind hurled him to the ground face first where he immediately died. The bearded man in red did not want the dishonor of a battle unfairly won, so he positioned himself to go under the bar. His back went out and, frozen in this unfortunate position, he too died. The limbo bar appears to have been removed by a third party, perhaps a witness or referee to the duel.” We stood in silence, shaken by the somber outcome of this battle. Aragorn suddenly let out a cry of anguish and kicked at a large mound of snow, which turned out to be a snow-covered fire hydrant. He limped away.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning. Thanks to my husband who saw this scene on his way to work and recommended I use it as inspiration for today’s blog.

This is an unremarkable photo of an unremarkable piece of land. The only remarkable thing about this is what’s no longer there. When we first moved here, that space was occupied by an old farmhouse with a matching set of old bachelor farmers who were brothers. They kept to themselves, but we occasionally saw one of them if our mail got dropped there by mistake. One of them would drive up to our back door, honk his horn, and hand off the mail. Very few words were spoken at those times. The house and outbuildings aged along with the brothers, looking vaguely sad and neglected. First one, and then the other brother died and the property went up for sale. The house was in such disrepair that no one wanted it. Eventually the city bought it and the whole neighborhood got notice that the house would be taken down in a controlled burn as a practice exercise for firefighters.

On the appointed day we all gathered to watch the execution. It was exciting and terribly sad at the same time.

I wondered just how long that house had been there, and how many children grew up there, and how many birthdays and anniversaries were celebrated there, and if those in the household had seen hard times, and who came running out that front door with joy when the snow melted and spring had come… I wondered about those two old bachelors and wished we’d taken the time to get to know them. A whole lot of history went down in flames that day.

Now go back and look at the original photo. You’ll see something you didn’t see before: a memory.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.

I made a tremendous discovery this morning! A Christmas cactus that was given to me over a year ago has finally bloomed:

So what? I don’t usually do well in the tending of plants. My daughter had left her Christmas cactus in my care when she left for college and between forgetting about it and then overwatering it, I pretty much destroyed it. With the helpful advice of a Gardening Master friend of mine, I was able to revitalize the roots of that sad, desiccated thing in a jar of water and then handed it off to the aforementioned daughter with a sigh of relief. When I received another one, it seemed a cruel irony, albeit a much-appreciated gift. I mended my wicked ways and sought to give it better care than its predecessor. After more than a year went by without any blossoms, I assumed the worst and wrote it off as just one more plant tending failure on my part. Yet, somewhere in the secret and hidden parts of that cactus, a flower was just waiting to delight and surprise me.

Is it possible that our prayers are sometimes answered in the same way? We look at what we can see (which is very little), and can be tempted to despair that God is not listening, nor is He acting on our behalf. And it’s unavoidably true that some of our petitions will not be granted, for God knows what we need better than we do. As C.S. Lewis said, “In our ignorance we ask what is not good for us or for others, or not even intrinsically possible.”

But sometimes God is at work in the secret and hidden places, waiting for just the right time to reveal what He has wrought for us. The next time I am discouraged about what seems like unanswered prayer, I’ll remember the extravagance of that blossom.

“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,  to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” Ephesians 3:20-21

I’ll probably delete this in the morning.