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Advent 2025 ~ Quiet

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Advent 2025

Week 1 ~ Quiet

December is only a week old, and Winter has arrived to wrap her frigid arms around our state. We have had a couple significant snowfalls already, with icy patches still left over from Monday night’s snow. And I am loving every moment of it!

Twenty-five years ago this winter, I discovered that there is no quiet so profound as that of snowfall and a world covered with a fresh, white blanket. I walked my college campus in the fluttery snowfall, astounded at how silent everything had become, no sound except for the crunch of my boots as I made my mark on a fresh, new world. I saw snow for the first time when I was nine years old, but that was all excitement, novelty, and play. I know for a fact that I didn’t appreciate this particularly beautiful aspect of winter at that time. Now, whenever the snow is falling, I try to step out onto the porch or into the doorway to listen as it hushes the world. I listen as it muffles the rush, quiets the hustle, and silences the busyness. We are forced to slow our cars, our steps, our plans. When we slow down, we can also quiet down.

I love the deep emptiness of snowfall-quiet, like the whole world is asleep and I alone am awake to witness its secret beauty. It softens the world, smoothing the rough edges and lines into graceful curves. The snow seems to gentle the harshness, reflecting even the light pollution back into the darkness in a starlight blue so we can see even in what should be the deepest of shadows. And isn’t that what we all need most in this season? Softness and light, gentleness and moments of stillness? Sometimes it makes me wonder if the “silent night” the songwriter describes is not indeed a night of moonlit snowfall.

In that snowy quiet, I am reminded that we are given a gift–the gift of Presence, where we are welcomed into Jesus’s arms and lap. A place of rest, reassurance, and recovery in the hollow of His presence and memory. That silent space where His love softens the edges of existence. As we move further into this Advent and winter season, may we slow down and submerge into the quiet. May we let it soften our moments, calm the crazy, and hold the precious close. Stand in the quiet, sink into the silence, and slow the rush. Maybe snowfall-quiet is here just so we can remember what it means to exist in heavenly peace.

Golden Glorious

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It was her first sunset. All on her own. She dipped her brush and set its tip against the sky. She painted a fiery glow behind slate-grey clouds, lining their edges with light. Beneath the clouds, she then hung the glowing orb of the sun in all its bittersweet dragonfire, drawing it lower and brighter with all the delicacy of a single hair. Its glow spread like a flower opening its petals against the ever-darkening clouds that blanketed above.

It was slow yet quick work, the splendor only there for a few moments but the painting of its descent painstaking and detailed nevertheless. Finally, all that remained of the light were amaranthine clouds, their undersides touched with pearly pink, the golden glory now replaced with an amberesque awe.

The sun drawn down, the air turning blue with night cool, she lifted her brush away. The deed was done, the masterpiece painted. She just hoped that, maybe, someone had been watching. Maybe someone had enjoyed her work. Her first sunset.

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While the resplendence of the light still warmed the flush of her cheeks, the pictures flew from her phone like rapid fire. Pictures of this glorious sunset witnessed from where she had sat on the hood of her car, letting the evening deepen and cool around her. The groceries could wait. This had been more important and definitely more beautiful.

Sunset

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The final moments of the day hover at the edge of the world like a last belch from the throat of a great dragon.

A dragon that would gobble up all of Time.

And it does, swallowing the Day down and exhaling Night in return.

Its flame eats itself opposite to the custom, breathing out velvet smoke where, once, fire burned bright.

Sneaky Houses

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On the way to my girl’s preschool, just across from the golf course, there is a row of houses. These houses are all set back from the road a bit, their driveways curving down into little valleys with the buildings nestled behind and in the deep cool green of ancient trees. My husband calls them “sneaky houses”.

I love sneaky houses. I love how they nestle there behind the treeline, screened, protected, and partially hidden. You can see them but only if you’re looking. If you’re not paying attention, you’d drive right by them. They hide there in plain sight, their beauty just barely peeking out. You have to look for them to find them. I also love that they are like people, particularly the people who have become the dearest and most special to me. Just like those sneaky houses, if we can look past what barriers people have been erected, the protections that have been hewn out, sink into the deepness of them, we may just find them even cozier and more welcoming than we originally thought.

Yes, I really do love sneaky houses.

BloPoMo Day 7, Post 2: “Cloud Swept Mornings”

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My husband’s admonition brought my head up from where I was scrolling quickly through Facebook on our morning drive to work.

“You have to see this.”

I looked up and he was right: I did need to see it. As we crested a hill, I could see the mist hanging over the fields in the barely-there sunlight. But it wasn’t mist like I normally expect it.

Misty clouds hung  over frosted, harvested fields like great birds hovering at their nests. The frost still hung crystal-white over the stumps of shorn cornstalks, the clouds refusing to leave their charges to the burn of sunlight just yet.

They were ceilings of misty gray, high enough to drive under but low enough for you to stick your hand up and out the window and touch.

Further on back across the fields from the road, the hazy clouds blanket and veil copses of leafless trees. It is as though they are endeavoring to make up for the glory that the trees have recently shed, covering their naked branches with silken silver.

Yes, he was entirely right: I had to see it.

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The Truth on Earth, Not in the Air

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It’s April and it smells like Christmas outside. It’s that cold, shimmering scent, one that promises things to come. I suppose, in that sense, Christmas and spring are similar in nature. Almost like the world is holding its breath, waiting for something. The air is cold and crisp, too much so for April for my tastes, but this is Indiana, after all. The grass is green, the trees are starting to shed their buds and press forth with leaves, albeit reluctantly, and so nature assures us of what the weather would belie:

Winter is done.

Spring is coming.

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The Memories of Raindrops and Sunbeams

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The weather has a memory. It remembers how we feel, just as the sensations it generates are buried in our minds.

Mother Nature remembers what thoughtful fancies flit through your mind when the clouds look like nests composed of cotton candy.

How your heart leaps, aches, thrills, or yearns when the sunlight is just so or the cool wind caresses the back of your neck.

It remembers how the scent of fall causes anticipation to bubble up in your soul.

How a park freshly carpeted with undisturbed snow can fill you from your toes to your crown with peace at its silence.

It remembers the way your heart beats a little bit quicker with something indescribable when the early-morning  sun races across the horizon to warm and caress your face in that one particular way.

How the blossoms of the dogwoods sparkle like stars in the moonlight, forming new constellations as they fall around you.

For this is the reason that Nature wields and weaves such a vast palette: not only for the nurturing of life but for the nurturing of the human soul.

A Dragon Sky

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Olaf would say that the sky is awake, and so it is. As I stepped outside to toss the trash into the hopper, I found myself struck and just staring upward. The moon is almost full–round and bright and beautiful–the air is crisp and lovely, and the clouds are racing over the sky, backlit in moonlight blue. The only description that came to mind was “dragon sky”. Like dragons, the epitome of air elemental, racing through the night air or their breath so hot billowing before or after them in a great exhale that mists the blue-black velvet above.

I just wanted to lie on the hood of the car and watch the sky, fall asleep to the cloudy symphony above. But then my family would worry and I would surely catch my death on the cold hood of a dew-covered car. So I shall settle for writing it down and calling it up in my mind’s eye for a smile as the night goes on.

Winter Whispers

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cute-girl-hai-snow-winter-Favim.com-355943Stepping outside, her feet meet diamonds on the sidewalk, the snowglobe world silently having been turned upside down as she had worked. The turn seems to have met its zenith as the flakes fall fast and thick and heavy. The stark white feathers flutter against her eyelashes and brush her cheeks cunningly, leaving a flushing pink behind as warmth rushes up to her skin after their cold kisses. Pulling her scarf tight, she glances up at the slate-grey sky, which just seems to smile at her in the form of a cold breeze lifting the curls of her hair for a brief moment, and a few snowy zephyrs leap up from the thickening drifts to play and nip at her ankles as she starts to make her way home. But she deviates today, her feet carrying her from path to park; such an even as the first snow deserves the respect of observation. Soon, her steps go from diamond-dusted to a pleasant crunch not unlike that first bite into perfect gingerbread. The wind flirts saucily with the hem of her coat and that of her skirtsnowy legs underneath it, caressing her legs with frosty fingers as though whispering her own beatuy back to her.

The world seems to grow quieter amidst the silence of the snowfall, the flakes interlocking their unique lattices together to form heavy white carpet that softens the cacaphony of the world. The hum and buzz and bustle seem to fall away, dampened by wintry ethereality, as if they cannot bear to disrupt such a transformation. A transformation that borders on the divine, with her as its single witness.

She has always loved winter, the long sleep of nature. Everything must take its rest, even the world itself in its turn. She loves the promise that lies in bare branches and blanched grass, to imagine what nature has in store for its next act in her lifetime. Even more so than that, winter teaches her to revel in the what is and the now. In this moment, not the looking forward or the glancing behind.

And so she walks in snowy footsteps, the world gone silent around and above her. Winter recognizes Her worshipper, a lady of Her court, and sends icy diamonds to adorn her hair and cloak her shoulders for this, the overture to Winter’s first whisper.

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BloPoMo Day 4: Amethyst Flashes in Autumn

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Now, as I drive home along the highways, I am met with a beautiful sight. Amidst the paling grass and slowly changing trees, there are brilliant flashes of color in the brush of the side ditches, fence rows, and treelines. It’s a brilliant purple flower that grows in bunches that shock and delight me, making me want to pull my car over and collect them in massive bouquets to fill my home with spring color in the midst of autumn warmth. I do not know for sure what they are and neither does my 4H-for-lifer husband. But, according my research, my best bet is that these could be vernonia or Prarie Ironweed. I will not pick them without knowing for certain–as I would not anything else–but, for now, I will just enjoy their stunning splashes in my day and the smile that always comes with their waving amethyst heads.