Let us go out from this little blue room, into the cold air, into the dim light, into our fright, into our despair.
Blue
The sky I see through the window is speckled with clouds that take turns passing in front of sun. When they move on, the sun returns its warm hand to my knee, a comfort on this frigid day.
The sky is a constant—even when I am buried under clouds, I can imagine it: the pale atmosphere, that shield against space, this little blue shelter amid the dark of unknowable vastness. The sky is still blue in winter. God still tends us in grief. Even if the clouds of our sorrow hide him, his work, or our heavy eyes do not open wide enough to catch sight of it, he stretches across our hours, a shield, a shelter.
Brown
The trees are holding snow in the crooks of their widening arms, in their split skin, carrying as many parcels of it as they can. The wind knocks off tiny drifts, which crash into one another and dissolve, invisible. Brown is a seriously underrated color—but if you’ve ever held a handful of rich, dark earth after winter, you will know it is a color that bears life—gives and remembers. To the stiff remnants of grasses look close, and you’ll see. The array of hues is muted, complex, like an worn, wooden chair, or an old, brass doorknob.
I tend to hurry my sorrows sometimes, and yet a time of sorrow and grief actually invites a time of rest. A season of barrenness that is necessary. It is an invitation to put some parcels down for a while, to submit to my own, good limitations. To be held instead of holding on. From that place in God’s hand, I can see beautiful things where I stubbornly believed they could not be found. The beauty may not speak loudly, may not “ask for attention,”1 but for anyone who is willing to see, beauty will be visible. “The earth is the LORD’s and all that fills it.”2 It is, in its apparent and obscure parts, being held, healed, and redeemed by the Lord, every season. Every season.
Green
The woods are full of emerald mosses—gems scattered across the copper ground until the snow obscures them. Those tiny green worlds seem to smile at me from among the dark, charcoal strokes of trees and undergrowth. They smile still from under the snow. I would not come to know just how much of it holds on to the rocks, fallen logs, and trees were it not for the receding tide of foliage, an absence that allows me to see differently.
In a season of grief, or a low season, when my lightness of spirit recedes, I have the opportunity to see what is beneath, what is tucked in my life’s corners, what is holding me. A season of fallow fields offers me insight into the numberless ways that God sustains me. The fallow seasons beckon me to a different way, to a deepening that cannot occur in the bursting bloom of summer. A way that I pray will last for many summers, on into the eternal season promised by God for all those who would be planted in his book.
“Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.” The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Psalm 24 ESV alternate translation
Oh this is a beautiful way to see winter. Thank you for taking the time to see this and express it.