is the most peaceful state, while Minnesota is 4th.  The cold, I think, probably mellows people out and there’s nothing like a good dose of -20 windchill to keep the whole street crime thing down to a dull roar.

that the American Dream is just that, a dream constructed of things that evaporate in value at the slightest touch of adversity and never last longer, at most, than a lifetime. We baptize this, as Christians, to our peril because it takes us in directions hostile to our soul. To be in union with God, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to have the basic things in life as we live in the greatest harmony possible with the Creation is all we truly need. If we have this we will probably not gain the whole of this world, but we will not lose our souls.

receding back into the ground as dull gray green grass takes its place. The trees are quiet with the sleep before morning their branches warmed by a higher sun.

Of course it won’t all come at once. There are fits and starts, days of light and hours of rain or snow and the cold that seems to always stay close to these parts. Yet they are here, the sure signs of another winter passed and the days to come when open windows fill a home with lively air.

As the years accrue winter loses its charms. Those things that were inviting to us in days gone by get colder and more formidable with every candle on the cake. We endure because we, for whatever reason, are here but our thoughts jump beyond the winter to some more hospitable place and then one day we realize we’ve basically spent more months than we imagined without ever leaving a building. We’ve become prisoners of our warm spaces, captives of the winds that stream down from Alberta.

Somewhere along the line the first cracks appear in that ice, the first signs of something more like life. The world seems to change. We seem to change. We stretch. We yawn. The scales fall off our eyes. We thaw as the world thaws. We emerge like the first blades of green grass or the daring tulip next to the house. It is spring and we join the rest of the world in taking a few tentative steps outside.

comforting about having a cat on the bed as you sleep. It’s like having a small sentinel against the evening darkness.

of growing older is the appreciation of spring. Winter, the plaything of a child, seems to grow longer with the years, colder, and harder on the soul. When the snow begins to melt, not the false melt of late January but the melting days of March when the sun and time guarantee the results, there is a sense of relief that grows over the years. The earth warms, and the human soul with it. The days are longer and life itself seems to extend, shaking off the gray and white and putting on green and all the colors of the sun.

As a child I noticed very little of all of this. I was glad to get out and play, of course, but the larger significance passed me by.  Spring is resurrection, the putting off the cold, the dying, the worn out, the tired, and its replacement with tender shoots of life. Within in it is a taste of the deepest human longings and the destiny we wish we hadn’t abandoned in Eden. It seems so much more apparent now. Perhaps its because as you get older the idea of seeds lying in the ground, abiding alone, awaiting the warmth of the world to bring them back to life seems so much more relevant.