Today, after several days of winter throwing its weight around, the sun came gloriously out.  We are entrenched in our house, behind heaps and battlements of snow.  The plow, with its gaping maw has not come yet to dig us out and our road is a nearly impassable latticework of furrows, trenches and hummocks.  But this morning, out with my shovel for the sixth day in a row, I was pleased to hear birds twittering, waxwings and chickadees alternating between branches of an aspen and a nearby chokecherry.  Later, a small V of geese went honking overhead, and I rested on my shovel, squinting upward to watch them on their way.

But the real wonder of the morning (no doubt for me and the chattering birds) was the sunshine.  As I worked the east side of my drive, throwing shovelfuls toward the curb, the breeze caught, and caught again, bits of flying snow, tossing it right back at me.  Then, as it blew around, the sunshine goldened each flake so that I stood in the midst of galaxies that were made, had their being, and vanished all in the blink of an eye. It was dazzling, really - these tiny gilded moments, meted out by the shovelful.  There's always things to see.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, patron saint of the nature essay, Annie Dillard writes, "I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.  It is possible, in deep space to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go.  The secret to seeing is to sail on solar wind.  Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff."

I love this.

Life is, of course, always casting us opportunities to whet our spirits.  I miss most of them, no doubt. (Suddenly, ridiculously, I am reminded of that classic I Love Lucy clip where Lucy and Ethel take jobs in a chocolate factory.  They're tasked with wrapping chocolates from a conveyor belt which far out paces their abilities.  Hi-jinks follow and chocolates fly everywhere).  But life is always sending us things to see, more gently perhaps than Lucy's chocolate conveyor.  We miss one, ten, a hundred?   It is no matter. Happily, another may be already at our elbow.  I caught the light while shoveling today.  Standing among the minuscule, momentary, flying galaxies, I felt glad, my life luffing and illuminated like the wind-driven snow.
 

               

The other day our school district sent out a mass email requesting parents accompany children to and from their bus stops.  A mountain lion had been found hanging around some home sites in the Middle Rattlesnake, a little too close to school routes for anyone's comfort.  "Your appreciation in this matter is appreciated," the email concluded.

We live in the Upper Rattlesnake, just a half mile past this spot where the lion was scooping house pets and other small delectables.  We live in this area precisely because it is adjacent to wild areas.  There's a network of trails and creek access right from our door - and we run, sled, bike, and walk through these areas regularly.

Now the deer and the coyotes and the bear and the mountain lions, and scores of other, smaller species, inhabit these areas too --as they should.  Every fall the bear come lumbering down from higher elevations and rummage in the trash, leaving their lumpy calling cards on the sidewalk.  And when that season comes, we rush to shut our garage doors so we won't be the neighbor who spends the morning picking up peach pits and paper towels and assorted trash fragments off the grass.

And in the late spring, when the fawns drop, we try not to notice them hiding in the shade of the mugo pine in our front yard, and try not to let the kids too near them when, knobbly-kneed, they get up and make a break for the lavender.  Other than the fawns, though, for the most part we've all together stopped noticing the deer, forever tromping in monotonous troops past the window, or shrugging their slim shoulders as we walk within a few feet of them.

But mountain lions - now that's another story.  In past years, some of our neighbors have spotted them in the brush at the end of our field - the general area where my boys have a fort.  When I send the kids out with sleds, I say "stay together, don't go too far afield."  And in the spring when all the brush at the base of the mountain buds out into leaflets, the boys call it the "greenwood" and go pathfinding through it, following animal tracks and deer lanes.  This is our world and I choose for them to be in it.

Mostly, I don't worry about their chance meeting with a mountain lion.  I count on them staying together and being noisy, as they unfailingly are.  But last week's email from the school reminded me again that we live in a state flush with wildlife and while we celebrate this mostly, we have to also think about making sure the small mammals that are our children get to and from the bus intact.  In Montana, I am regularly reminded that we are one species among many.  The grass I mow, the land that legally falls into our property, the trails my kids follow through the greenwood, these belong to countless beings.  And this continual reminder of that humbling reality - that we are among multitudes - is one of the reasons life in Montana always remains so compelling.

Yesterday I was cleaning out my closet, folding pants, hanging shirts, culling things for donation to the Good Will when I came across a slip of torn yellow paper onto which I long ago copied a quote from Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov.    If you've read the book, you might remember that Alyosha records things his spiritual teacher, Father Zossima, recounts near the end of his life.  This quote comes from those last musings:

"But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim.  "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for a man to know all happiness.  My dears, why do we quarrel, boast before each other, remember each other's offenses?  Let us go to the garden, let us walk and play and love and praise each other and bless our life."  

I have been carting this torn slip of paper around with me for years now, through several moves even.  It has been pinned to a bulletin board, tucked in a book, nestled on a shelf in my closet and when I come upon it all of a sudden, I feel my life lift up, I've caught the moment my life is blessed.

The other day I was sitting at a coffee shop, tapping out some paragraphs on a story, when my phone lit up with a text from my brother.  He happened to be rereading the part of the Brother's Karamazov from which my quote comes. "I think it's the dearest most enlightened thing I've ever read," the text said.  I typed back as best I remembered my missing quote (not knowing it was hibernating beneath a pair of corduroys on my shelf).  "It's so anecdotally truthful" he wrote.  "That book is perfect." I wrote, "wisdom literature."

What I love about this moment with my brother -- though thousands of miles apart and using texts, of all things -- is that we were indeed acting as Zossima counsels. Through our few minutes of sharing these precious thoughts we were entering the garden, walking together, playing, praising, blessing our lives.

The gate to that garden is everywhere -- in this case a few texts swung it open and we found ourselves glad, embracing each other, loving this life.  I don't live in that place as much as I could wish... which of us do?  But what's strange is how easily that gate swings open when given a little nudge.  It doesn't take grand visions, but is so often made of humble things -- a walk, a romp in the snow with my kids, a single conversation with a friend -- and all of a sudden my life is ennobled, my stock of reality is broadened, deepened, replenished, and I understand, if only momentarily, the ways in which one day is indeed enough.

The snow is back.  After our dry January, winter has reasserted itself with daily dispatches of snow and wind.  There are neat little aisles where the neighbors have gone through with snowblowers and then there's our driveway and sidewalk which are more of a patchwork shovel affair.  As I stack the snow up with my big yellow metal-edged shovel, Birtie comes along with her little green plastic shovel and scrapes mounds back into the walkway.  Then she flops in a pile and snow tumbles down around her.  We do this little back and forth of piling and unpiling for awhile, until I judge that things are cleared enough that my neighbors will not risk life and limb crossing my sidewalk to retrieve their mail.  But no matter what sort of path Birtie and I agree to leave, the wind comes along shortly and drifts it all again --- my shoveled (and toddler-deshoveled) walk as much as my neighbors' snowblown one.  Thank goodness, wind disheveles equally.

Our neighborhood sits smack up against land that rises and rises until it becomes Mount Jumbo.  At our end of things, this quickly changing topography makes for some fantastic sledding.  The pack of neighborhood boys have a whole lexicon to the sledding runs they've made: the Luge, Snow Face, Epic Death.  I send my boys out in snowpants and mittens and scarves and hats and try to protect them from the elements so they can hurtle themselves down crazy careening pitches with their pals, two to a sled.  That's the fun in being in a kid, right? - oblivious to the cold and the danger until all of a sudden it's dark and time for hot cocoa and you realize you can't feel your fingers anyway.

In addition to sledding, we've been popping down to our neighborhood rink to skate.  Several years ago, I took six weeks of basic figure skating (which was a hoot and Tim has the recital video to prove it).  And last year I ditched my figure skates for hockey skates.  Like many things in life (learning another language, playing an instrument, etc...) skating is something I wish I had mastered in my youth.  I have a lot farther to fall now than I did when I was eight and there's a lot more of me to hit that ice.  But, despite these caveats, skating is a family favorite these days and if I have an odd, open hour to myself, I often go practice my turns - forward crossover, backward crossover, forward crossover, backward crossover.  Around and around I go and when it's time to leave, I say to myself, "just one more round."  And when that round is done, I go again. 

There's something absolutely delightful about practicing.  In adult life, I so rarely feel myself improve at anything.  It's more the case that I've hit basic proficiency with many things and keep to these familiar routines.  But skating is different.  I can work a turn until I've done it faster and tighter.  I can make progress on trusting my outside edges more.  That's the kind of obvious learning that isn't the regular stuff of adulthood and its the thrill that will keep me out there, like my boys sledding down Snow Face, until long after the sun is down and I finally realize I can't feel my fingers.  Now if only there was someone at home readying me a steaming cup of cocoa, that would be a reason to unlace my skates.