Ice Fishing

Here, there is silence. A thick covering of silence as white and heavy as the snow that carpets everything. Snow absorbs and mutes noises so that the world comes at you through a veil of cotton. The colors are bleached out like faded calico. There is nothing besides the white of the snow and the dreary bricks. But it is the silence that is most disturbing. Unnatural. Empty.

Life has different seasons. I am in a winter. The cold bare midwinter of Chicago, yes, but my own emotional winter as well. A time of fruitlessness. A time of suspended animation. A time of dearth. The landscape is monochromatic. The topography is flat. The branches are bare.

It’s hard here, in Chicago’s winterscape, to write and muse on life. Whenever, in Atlanta, I was stuck, I would simply head out to the front porch and look out over the tree line. Listen to the cicadas singing and the tree frogs croaking—the metallic unwinding of the Katydids. Or walk through the blanket of humidity and feel the tough, scratchy Bermuda grass beneath my bare feet.

But I must also remember that this blog was started in the spring. New growth. Budding leaves. The bearing of fruit. I must not begrudge myself this season of winter. Perhaps I should, instead, allow it to work on me. Allow my pulse to slow, allow my body to slumber. Maybe this is a time for reflection and cloistering. A time for incubation as much as for hibernation. Suspended animation, yes, but an active time nonetheless. When the lake freezes over, life continues beneath the ice.