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.