Winter in the snowy north elicits a variety of feelings and desires. Love it, hate it, endure it, marvel in it – take your choice. As people age, I’ve observed that many, believers in God or not, let the negatives start to overwrite the positives. And some of the negatives become significant, life coloring, especially if you can’t flee to Florida or the Gulf Coast for lack of time or money.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve shifted to a different outlook, one that loves winter. Why? I’ve pondered that ‘love it, hate it’ schism towards winter and my siding with loving that cold season. What in me is drawn to the snow, the quiet, the isolation, the blanketing of the senses?

I see two inception points. One is my SPELL, a phycological acronym from Dr. John Bradshaw that stands for Source Peoples Emotional Legacy Language.  It speaks to the legacy of how we are made and marked by our families while growing up. Several of my SPELLs included not making waves with my parents, accommodating anyone around me, and choosing quiet as a safe place, both within and outside of me. Winter was ideal for the interior world. The blanketing quiet of the land where we lived, surrounded by farm fields, sleeping hills and still forests, became a haven of peace for my agitated soul, something I did not recognize until years later. Those younger years of finding solace there, it became etched on my soul.

The second point, strangely, is beauty. That’s the only word I can think to describe it. All the seasons have their minuses, though many would say winter has it in abundance – the seeping cold, frozen fingers, toes or faces, effort to shovel snow, slips or falls, feeling trapped until cabin fever kicks in. Yet each of those descriptors holds a seed that points towards beauty.  

The seeping cold – it finds the shell of our bodies, teaching the fragility and preciousness of life. My frozen fingers, toes, faces – feeling the limits of our bodies, learning to endure, be awake, alive. The effort to shovel the snow – it slows time, scoop by scoop, and enlivens muscles, limbs, even our skin. Then the possibly of slips or falls – it keeps senses sharp, to be present to the moment, observant of black ice. And feeling trapped – an insulating cocoon, allowing space to relax the mind, to let go of the world.

Each of those seeds provide a sharpening of the senses and a space to experience the beauty that God paints into the winter season. I’ve been blessed to live near the Adirondack, a large, expansive area in northern New York that holds ancient mountains, worn down compared to their kin in the Rockies, yet challenging to climb, especially in Winter. My wife and I have climbed all 46 of the mountains in the summer that are over 4,000 foot, claiming our ADK 46’er number of 5805 and 5806. We re-climbed 17 of them with a daughter and son-in-law in the winter between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox.

Thought it’s been a few years since the last ascent, the felt images of winter in those mountains is still impossible for me to describe, their astonishing snowy beauty beyond words.

It’s an otherworld that you wouldn’t expect to exist. The snow lays a thick blanket strewn across the landscape, skinned with a sparkling coat, like frosting, encapsulating the rocks and outcroppings and pines into spectral beings. The trees and exposed rock slides are snuggled under snowy blankets, captured in beautiful paintings like this one by Cori Ross, an amazing artist in Seattle, WA. The profound silence, all sound absorbed into the snowflakes resting packed together, quieted until the spring melts release the sounds of new growth, the awakening of the warming pines as they shake off their coats.

The seeping cold – it finds the shell of our bodies, teaching the fragility and preciousness of life.

In those mountains, the surrounding silence is felt in the cold wrapped tight against cheek and nose, the only parts exposed at those elevations, a quieting filter to ears and mind. It opens a space within one’s self where one can feel the life of your body, aware of its beauty in muscle and bone. And the silence is nature’s blanket, covering the waiting lives of plant and animal until the earth tips back towards the sun again.  

Yet one has to have the eyes, whether looking out a suburban home’s frosted window, or taking in the surrounding vista on a trail to the top of an Adirondack peak, to see the rich beauty within the cold of winter. I think many of us over time begin to harden our views and opinions of how we experience the world around us. I remember sitting on a beach once in Rock Harbor, MA. The smell of decay wafted up from the rotting seaweed draped on exposed rocks. I was lamenting the hot sun and bugs when an elderly woman chided me for complaining and for not choosing to see the goodness of what God had created around me. I’ve never forgotten that rebuke.

Those kind but pointed words embedded themselves within and have helped me see the richness, the beauty that surrounds me – and you. I had begun to let the dis-ease and dis-comfort and cynical diss-ing of life’s experiences to hardening parts of my soul.

I thank God for speaking to me through her. I would wish that same blessing of wisdom on those that struggle with winter and seeing its beauty. May her words brighten their hearts and enlighten their experience of snow and cold.

Oh, and God? Make sure they have a warm coat, gloves and hat if they go outside, or a beautiful, frosted window when inside.