I opened Rilke's Letters on Cezanne today.  For some reason these letters have been on my mind as spring begins its slow forward creep.  Later spring will come bounding and rushing, moving boulders in the creek bed, spreading an abundance of blossoms.  But now, at the beginning, it progresses by "littles": stretching light a bit further into each evening, dropping calves in the field, lifting tiny, fragile shoots of green underfoot.

In this season, my mind is on Rilke's letters because they are luminous, making every best idea in me want to stretch and send up exultant green shoots.  In 1907, Rilke wrote to his wife about a visit to an exhibition of Cezanne paintings:

Today I went to see the pictures again;  it's remarkable what a surrounding they create.  Without looking at a particular one, standing in the middle between the two rooms, one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality.  As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all.  The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand among them as ready as possible, you get the impression that they are doing something for you.

Phew... did you get that?  Did you feel that spring breeze lift your hair?  Rilke is saying that standing receptive among these Cezanne paintings gave him the impression that he was being changed.  Isn't that exactly how it feels being among these first outlays of spring? The first vanilla scent of ponderosa sap or the morning lilt of the meadowlark or that iridescent flash from a passing mountain bluebird, these are all doing something for me.  The simple truthfulness of these sights, sounds and smells, educate me.  But in what? There's no syllabus, no course notes, no test, no way to measure how I've changed or even that I'm changing.  This is a province that resists proofs.  It's a territory navigable only by intimations, suggestions, best guesses, hopes.  

I know that the meadowlark sings its song for its mate, or its territory, or because the sun is up and it is such a day.  Its singing has nothing to do with me - it is not for me.  And yet, it works on me.  The other day, on a run in the hills, the trail took me from one meadowlark to the next. With each thrilling song, I felt myself lift right up and nearly sail over the grass.  The songs felt like "the knot in the rosary at which ... life says a prayer" (Rilke again).  How good that we don't have to search up and down and haul ourselves over barren miles to find a teacher.  Already, our education is all about us, in sounds and sights and smells, underfoot and overhead.        

Today is Ash Wednesday.  If you're not familiar with the tradition, Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the period of forty days leading to Easter.  These days, if Lent is thought of at all, it's often portrayed as a time of self-denial (giving up dessert, or wine, or coffee, or some other of life's small pleasures) and sometimes as a time of guilt.

This is all wrong.  Lent isn't about giving up things, but gaining them.  Lent isn't guilt, it's awareness.  And mostly, Lent is opportunity.  Sometimes at the beginning of a yoga class, a teacher invites participants to set an intention for their practice.  This is something like the invitation of Lent, but instead of holding that intention for forty-five minutes, you get to be in it for forty days.

And Ash Wednesday is that invitation.  It's an invitation to hold before you this one important fact - a fact, that typically, I (and possibly you) spend considerable energy keeping out of daily consciousness: You are dust, and to dust you will return.

Dust.  That's it.  That's the end game.  And it's the starting point.

This past Friday, our kids had a snow day.  Windy and cold, the weather kept us from venturing past the end of our street.   My boys, joining the battalion of neighborhood kids, turned snow piles into fortresses.  In the afternoon, I pulled Birtie on a sled to a friend's down the block.  My friend and I sipped tea and ate chicken soup and commented on the coziness of sheltering in place during our crazy few days of weather. Then my phone lit up with a text and our day changed.  My cousin, who lives a few miles down the thin finger that is our Rattlesnake Valley, sent me these words.  "Avalanche in the Lower Rattlesnake.  Don't let your kids go out and sled."   I called him immediately.  He had been driving home right after the slide had occurred and was stopped in the few cars backed up where snow had piled all the way down onto our main drive.  Then he added these words, "There's a child buried and about thirty people out digging already.  It doesn't look good."

A child buried.  I had just been eating chicken soup, enjoying the cozy fun of a snow day and now there was tragedy in our community, just right down the way, and my heart was in my feet.  I went and rounded up my boys, still busy extending their snow fort.  "Don't go sled." I hugged them, eyeing the hill just beyond our street, the foothills of the mountain where the slide had just happened.  "Don't go anywhere."

In the next few hours, we learned the child, an eight year old, had been dug out, miraculously alive, though in condition unknown.  Then the news came that owners of a house utterly destroyed by the avalanche had been inside when it hit.  Somewhere, beneath all the rubble and the snowfield, they were buried.   Again, miraculously, after hours of work by scores of first responders and volunteers, both were found alive, having landed in air pockets within the snow.  Tragically, in the following days, the woman, who had spent more than three hours beneath that freezing slide, died from complications.

This has been on the mind of everyone I've talked with in recent days.  Who would have thought it possible?, we all ask.  We think about where our houses are situated and eye the pitch of the slope behind us.  Not very steep where we live, I reassure myself.  But mostly what we think about and talk about is the mom, who saw her son swept away under the snow and spent an hour in terror and hell waiting for him to be dug out.  And we think about the couple who were spending the same cozy day at home as we all were, when the snow unloaded.

Dust.  It's not a concept that I want to look squarely in the face - in the face in the mirror that is, or in the faces around my evening dinner table.  But that's exactly the reality Ash Wednesday invokes.  When I lean into awareness of this arc - from dust, to dust - rather than try to dispel it, I understand that a certain wisdom comes from this orientation.  A wisdom, namely, that we, for all our knowledge and science and big brains, are creatures.  And like all creatures, we will crumple at the last, but, to the last, we live as well.

And that's what we gain in Lent, the opportunity to live-- really, fully, wisely.  The opportunity to ask questions of ourselves: to what do I turn for Nourishment?  Joy?  Love?  How do I contribute (wittingly and unwittingly) to injustice in the world?  How do I better align myself with justice and peace and mercy, with the beautiful, with all the things of God?

Today, with ashes on my forehead, I live in the awareness that I only have so long as animate dust.  May I spend the time well, treasure it well, give it well, keep it well, release it well.