shawled in beauty

Shawled with icy lace
The trees bend and crack
Victims of adorning beauty
Mother Nature’ double gift
Wonderment and pain in one
Crystallized in freezing rain.


Last night I learned rain had texture as I drove home form teaching my night class. Torrents if heavy woolen drops obscured my vision and made clench the steering wheel. Misty mini drops like delicate lace webbing followed the torrent and so I relaxed my clenched fists. There even patches of dry road where the rain had ceased and only the wind remained and pushed against my car with Olympian force.

The sky danced with light and rocked with thunder during the night. Rain fell forcefully and fitfully in alternating patterns. As storms are more or less my metaphor of life, I enjoyed the sky show and fell asleep lulled by the miracle of needed moisture.

Today I awoke to soft rain but with pellets sounding on roof and road. Ice was raining and trees were being wrapped in their lace shawls of the frozen moisture. The beauty was awe inspiring even though I knew it would spell death for some of those so dressed in beauty. One-quarter inch of ice will break branches to the ground and rip them from the parent plant. The cost of a moment’s glory can be a heavy toll.

Life like the iced trees can have moments of glory and beauty. Most are just that beauty and the memories give us joy forever. But some a dreadful few hide an ulterior purpose and these leave behind scars. We all have them---disappointing loves, lost careers. Illness. Life touches us with both and we, mere humans that we are, must learn to cope, to seek balance, to survive. This survival is what endows us with compassion for the plights of others and to help them with the scary moments even when we are in our happiest. This is what makes us truly human to be able to feel the needs of others and to respond.

For me my faith gives me the strength to bear up when life is not as I would have it and to rejoice when it exceeds my expectations. To be an atheist it seems to me is to be a boat without a rudder aimlessly tossing at each new event with nothing outside your own thoughts to sustain you and give you comfort. But each of us must determine how to face the beauty and the pain of life in our own way. I choose faith,


T