11-Dec / 0 COMMENTS

First snow of the season has descended and blanketed the city in dense white down. I swipe off the alarm on the smart phone and check for delays and closings on the local news website. Then I turn over in my bed soft and warm for a delicious snooze.  While the rest of the house still asleep, I come down to the kitchen and start the coffee. From my kitchen window, the streets appear treated already by the efficient county salt trucks and only the sidewalks are still snow covered. The absence of activity outside and inside is palpable and I notice the inexplicable sense of peace and spaciousness in myself as I pour myself a cup of coffee and stir in the half and half cream.  No rushing about to get the lunches packed, the breakfast offered and eaten in hurry, no urgent pocket checks to make sure the phones are in place, the travel mugs of coffee secured with a lid, no forms or permission slips left behind, and really. nothing. to rush to.

My mind wonders off to references to snow as a metaphor for redemption; just as it covers over the landscape in white, our imperfections, our flaws, mistakes, and etc are supposedly covered with a sense of a new beginning. But I argue against this logic in my mind.  The snow covered white is beautifully pristine and virtuous seeming as long as its mask is undisturbed by ordinary life – the cars, the foot traffic, kids and dogs playing in it. And soon enough, there is grayish brownish slush everywhere. Perhaps my opinion of the snow covered whiteness is formed by a childhood game that we used to play in Korea.  After the snowman building, snowball fighting, snow angel making, and other form of playing in the snow, there would be a contingent of over exuberant kids who would dig a hole about a foot wide and as deep. The hole would be filled with mixture of dirt and water. (Yes, some kid would actually go home to fetch a bucket of water for this operation.)  Then it would be covered over with fresh snow patched together from another part of the playground so that to the unsuspecting eye, there would be no sign of the muddy hole beneath the white cover. 

Then, the treachery began. The kids who dug the hole will invite an unsuspecting kid to a game of foot race with the finish line near the snow covered hole. If you happened to enter the play ground well after the dig-n-cover operation, and a bunch of kids seeming to be full of fun invited you to play with them, why wouldn’t you want to run with them? So off you go running with these kids with their eyes shiny with mischief and just as you reach the finish line, plop! You find yourself falling into the trap and your leg covered up to knee in muddy mess. Pretty rough, I know. I don’t recall anyone getting hurt but for sure, there would be a cackle of laughter followed by a mad pursuit with some form of revenge intended as the muddied kid chased after someone fleeing.

Certainly snow covered doesn’t mean treachery below in every circumstance.  The snow simply covers; the mundane and ordinary along with beautiful and perfect. What I’m pointing to instead is the covering, the hiding aspect of snow covered landscape. Yes, absolutely it renders everything it covers with a sense of re-freshing and a new-canvas-feel.  And we like this feeling because why? Whether you answer because of the sense of covering or because of the sense of renewal, how would it be if we not wait for the snow to know these moments of restart? How about if we began a practice accepting ourselves every moment just as we are? Could that help us see our flaws or imperfections not as something to hide but merely to render us human? A wise man once said, “Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.” How right he was. Isn’t it on the back of all the errors in our trials that we get to reach the ultimate answer?  

I am encouraging all of us to begin blessing the mundane, the errors, the ordinary, and hold them up as grace notes that lead us to holy, shiny, glorious moments. And when we are judged by our maker in the end, let us be sure in ourselves that we stand above the foundation of those grace notes that we’ve blessed along the way. Not because they were beautiful. Not because they were better. Rather because they were exactly the opposite. And they gave rise to the occasion that we accept, embrace, and love all that have lead us to the point. This moment right now that we get to declare whatever we wish.