Unlikely and Comfortable

March. The snow remains like an Ansel Adams photograph,
silver tinted grey. no signs of life. No humans to ruin the view.
Five below and somehow perfect.

Here in Vermont there will be more of this.
WInter transcends calendars here.
It is something Southerners like me grow accustomed to.
Of if we don’t we leave. Most of us do.

But I remain. I have chosen the cold I can endure
and the cold I cannot. Bodies warm faster than hearts.
And here, snow and all, I have healed.

I probably do not need this place any longer.
It has done it’s work. It has kept me safe
from the soul weather that threatened to undo me.
I probably do not need this pace, but it has become comfortable

And that is something that has been rare in my life.
Comfortable.
I have transformed here, into that rarest of things,
myself. I have surrounded myself

with similar souls with different opinions.
It is a good place to be and I wonder sometimes
if I could have become someone else. somewhere else.
Maybe. Maybe not. But it would have taken longer.

It is good to stand here. To see the three trees
laced with snow. To feel the silence. Listen to the stillness.
Happy to be here. I have become more still

as the world has become more unruly, loud and ugly.
More sure of the right paths even as the world
shouts me down. I was not made for conflict,
but in the stillness, I have become better at it,

An unlikely disciple of love. A constant restoration project
that knows no seasons; that lives in Advent and Lent
at the same time. Content. Content, not satisfied,
to show my cracks, just to see God work.

I take a deep breath, and the icy air fills my lungs.
It almost hurts. But it is good to breathe the air of loss,
the air of survival and what is to come. It is all one.

About this poem.

Too much going on in this poem to list. But here is a partial list. A a bit autobiographical about my time here in Vermont. A bit about my journey from moderate republican to a Bernycrat,
a bit about my unlikely path to the ministry, a bit about breathing which has been hard the past few days as I fight RSV, Pneumonia and Bronchitis all at once. (I am on the mend, no need to feel sorry for me. A poem about the unlikely way God works. A poem about change throughout a life. A wondering what change might come in what remains of my life. Poetry is never about one thing.

The picture was taken in Dorset, Vermont.

Tom