Still here?  Well, I warned you, so, okay, I was driving south through California on Route 235.  All that flat, black, boring macadam.  Those tedious, humdrum stores.  I was minding my own business, you understand, neither wishing for this nor hoping for that, not expecting anything except more of what I already had when I saw a scroll-work, a filigree, a lacy marvel of delicate shapes splashed and spangled across the road.  Shadows.  Cast by the 3 o’clock sun beaming behind a strip of skinny, skimpy, barren trees growing forlornly along the curb.

That was the hole, and I fell hard.  Flagpoles, traffic lights, cars, garbage cans … stripped of their detail and pared down to pure outline, they all possessed an exotic and intoxicating beauty.  Mesmerized, I could hardly drive myself home, but even there I was no longer safe.  My same-old same-old Venetian blinds turned a blank wall into a spectacular gridwork of slanting lines.  An unremarkable collection of objects atop my coffee table changed a bland carpet into a fantasy garden.

What did I tell you?  See?  Now you’re stuck, same as me, scoping out the nooks and crannies of your formerly ho-hum existence.  Have you noticed?  Depending on the angle of the light source, shadows faithfully mimic but hopelessly distort their originals.  Thicker, thinner, longer, shorter, awry, askew, tilted.  Objects get duplicated every which-a-way on any which-a-thing: a mailbox on a barn roof, a person climbing a chimney, why, just this morning a tree grew itself right through my window and onto my dining table, bringing a soft breeze with it on trembling leaves.

Shadows are the funhouse surprise hidden in life’s serious underbelly, but they can have important consequences.  Peter Pan risked everything to get his back, and its recovery inaugurated the journey to NeverNever Land.  Where would we be without Tinker Bell and Captain Hook?  Then there’s that pesky groundhog, whose amblings make no sense at all, I mean, if the creature sees his shadow, the sun’s out and spring should be closer, not further away, but the folks up in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania have invented some flabberdiflap about a Candelemas Day legend, which you can check out for yourself, I don’t give it much credence.

A rain shadow is a dry area behind a mountain range.  Sound vanishes into an acoustic shadow.  The psychologist Carl Jung called the negative parts of ourselves we don’t want to admit we have our shadow.  He said real maturity only comes when we take responsibility for those ugly, unwelcome newsflashes from the soul’s frontier.  It’s only late January, but when I walked through the woods last week all the multiflora vines already sported bright new leaves.  Is that a shadow?  I don’t know, Alice, it’s just you and me together in this topsy-turvy world.

The work of winter.  An odd thought.  Intrigued, I decide my errands can wait while I RSVP to this unexpected invitation.  Remembering a park nearby, I head there, noting that heaven itself seems naked today: blue-gray clouds on a gray-blue sky.  Despite what I know – that each season possesses its own wisdom – I’ve always hated winter.  Have always preferred to build of its hard-packed longings something like a tower from which I could spy, in the distance, the coming spring.  Now winter proffers her hand in friendship.  Shall I take it?

I park my car and leave it, like some discarded garment.  I need to be naked.  Exposed. Like the trees themselves.  The path I choose – or is it chosen for me? – takes me deep into the woods. Or is this the framework of a house being built?  So many questions, so few answers, and that, too, is the work of winter, I suspect.  To strip away the green flesh of our assumptions, taking us down to the bare bones of perplexity.  The framework of a life being built.  Of many lives being fashioned from puzzle and inquiry.  The house that is the life of the world.

This forest, now, is the gray realm of burnt things: ash, charcoal, cinder.  Of hard, metallic things: iron, steel, granite, lead.  And yet, something is revealed here that hitherto had been hidden.  Just there, in the serpentine twist of a limb, the rope-like curve of a bough, the surprise of twigs flaring forth from the tip of that branch, like fingers on a groping hand.  And there, in the bold lines or brazen angles of trunks straight or bent.  I can see what living has done to each tree, I can see, in consequence, every storm, every wind, every drought.  Good season, bad season.  Accident, happy chance.  I can see it all, and I am here to tell you this: it is all beautiful.

Deep calls to deep, the psalm says.  In this skeletal wood, my own soul’s bones expose themselves: the choices I’ve made, my mistakes, my regrets.  Yet the marrow of me knows what the cold sap knows: the fundamental architecture of any life is beautiful.  All our leanings and all our twistings, our fits and starts, our strides and missteps, it’s all a hidden magnificence.  Even when choice has been taken from us – through brutal storm or harsh accident – even then, something beautiful is being built. One life.  Many lives.  The house that is the life of the world.

I return to car and errands, startling a flock of small birds:  black pepper swirling to spice a gray sky.  I have clasped winter’s hand in friendship, and glad I am for the chance.

Leaping from Astronomy to Quantum Physics, I’d like to point out something else.  Scientists can demonstrate in their labs that, while atoms are mostly empty, the emptiness is not really a void but, rather, a cloud of possibility out of which protons, neutrons and electrons appear and disappear.  Matter isn’t solid at all, it’s a furling unfurling abyss from which substance manifests, and, according to Superstring Theory, the newest scientific model, all those particles as well as the gravity that binds them together form, not separate objects or distinct forces, but an indivisible strand of energy in constant communication with itself.

Leaping from Quantum Physics to a recent walk on the beach, I’d like to tell you about the dead heron I found.  I felt compelled to spread out its wings, as if the bird were still flying.  To stretch out its neck, as if it were heading westward.  To place, in its beak, the dead fish lying next to it.  Then I scrubbed my hands with sand, rinsed them in waves that flapped on the beach like wings, continued my stroll.  Later, going back to my car, I heard a rifle’s report in the woods.  And realized: that heron had been shot from the sky in full flight, its dinner wriggling in its mouth.

Where did it come from, the impulse to re-enact the heron’s last few minutes of life?  I believe there was a silent tug on the strand of energy linking our bodies.  You can believe what you want, but let me point out that the first year of the second decade of the only new millennium any of us will ever know has begun in exceptional fashion, linked by a rare and special light to the year preceding it, asking us to pay attention to that which is bridged, yoked, hinged together.  It is not a concatenation of separate objects, this Universe we inhabit, it is a continuum, an indivisible unit existing for a common purpose, unto a common promise.  What is it they say?  “United we stand, divided we fall.”  Patrick Henry and Mahatma Gandhi used it of their separate nations, perhaps this year we’ll learn to use it of the continuum called Earth.

When the sun rises. When the sun rises on my river. When the sun rises on my river, and an incoming tide of light submerges, one by one, the sky’s small pebbles of light. And the leaves of trees emerge from silhouette.  And the groaning onyx waters turn to flashing silver sighs. Then, yes, I shall know I have arrived, face to face with the morning star.

And yes, I think it matters. That my celestial assignation is not with a star at all but with a planet. Venus. Except for the moon, Venus is the brightest object in our sky, in closer orbit to the sun than earth. First to appear in the gloaming, last to disappear at dawn. Alpha and omega. Venus, the planet named for love and beauty, who watches over our endings and beginnings.

In Roman times, the goddess appeared in many guises. Venus Cloacina, the Purifier, giver of peace. Venus Genetrix, the great Mother, who bestowed fertility on folk and field. VenusFelix, the Lucky; Amica, the Friend; Libertina, the Free; Obsequens, the Graceful; and,Verticordia, the Changer of Hearts. Venus. Our morning and evening star. Fashioned from the same nebula that formed the planet earth, named for all our yearnings, watching over.

The sun has set on the river of time we called ‘last year.’ Rises now on the same river, called ‘this year.’ Pause. When you set out along this highway, where were you going? Are you sure you want to arrive there? Take stock. Is there something you might wish to put down? Something else more suited to this journey you think you might wish to take up?

Get serious. It matters. All the fields and all the folk, all the planets and the stars, we’re all made from the same stuff. Protons, neutrons, electrons. A trembling flow of atoms and molecules. Action and reaction. Electromagnetic currents that groan and sigh. One vast and mighty river, what happens to me happens to you happens to them and it forever.

Ask questions. The year is just beginning. As of January 1st, you had 365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes until it ends. Let’s say today is the morning star, still lingering in the dawn of last year. Before she appears as evening star in the year’s gloaming, what do you want to accomplish? Think. Don’t answer off the top of your head. Don’t answer for yourself alone. Look beyond family, neighborhood, country. Look beyond your own lifetime. One vast and mighty river, remember? What happens to me happens to you happens to them and it forever.

And don’t be glib. Don’t say “world peace” if you don’t mean “world peace.” If you’re not ready to do something to make this a more peaceful world. And if you’re not ready, admit it. Spend the year asking the Changer of Hearts to change yours. I’ll do the same. What happens to me happens to you happens to them and it forever.

So when the sun sets on our river of minutes, hours, days, years. When the flow of atoms ceases for you and me. We shall leave behind our trembling and our sighs, and ready ourselves to set out upon a golden highway.  To meet, face to face, that from which we were fashioned. Our alpha and our omega, the sum of all our yearnings. When the sun rises.

What about celebrating something we all share? What about that big fiery ball up in the sky? The one that gives us, you know, everything? Dawn, dusk, light, life, energy, you name it, the sun provides it, and on the 21st of December it does the most amazing, stupendous, monumentally meaningful thing on the planet: it stops its apparent southward journey, stands still in the sky, then turns north again so that our short, shorter, shortest days begin to reclaim their long, longer, longest status.

Ignorant of earth’s tilt and the science of rotation, our ancestors were frightened this time of year. What if the sun keeps going? What if it never comes back? Rituals evolved to catch it, hold it, convince it to return. The Hanukkah Menorah, the Scandinavian Yule Log, the candles of Advent and Kwanzaa – our festivals during this season are obvious efforts to push back the cold and dark with warmth and light. Lovely. But necessary? Don’t we already know the sun will reverse its pendulum swing without our help?

What about something we don’t already know? Something that aligns us with mystery, and with those forces at work throughout the universe that have guided and energized humanity for all of its several million year history. The writer John Fowles says, “There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be.” December 21st is Nature’s fulcrum, the pivot about which the lever of our days and nights revolves. I’m wondering if the 21st Century could be humanity’s fulcrum, the moment in evolutionary history when we accept a fact that has grown short, shorter, shortest in our consciousness; that is, we will never become greater than the web of life through, with and in which we were fashioned. We are and always will be part of a single sacred community called Earth (long), called the Milky Way (longer), called the Universe (longest), and this, it seems to me, is something we can all raise a glass to this season.

No need to shelve our Santas, our crèches, our dreidels, our Swahili dictionaries in order to reclaim our large, larger, largest status. Just look up into the sky on December 21st and say to the sun, “We are no longer diminishing, you and I, we have changed direction, and hencefo

Then I saw them, freshly minted by the ebbing tide. I picked up one, then another: glistening pebbles like frosted glass. I couldn’t fathom why, but I had to have more, so I ran that day up and down the beach, rejecting anything solidly white, plucking up anything translucent, stuffing my coat pockets, hurrying home with my treasures, and it’s only as I write that understanding dawns: carbonic acid in the water has leeched away their salts. Once opaque, these stones have offered their very substance to the river. Now they are transparent bearers of the light.

But the days grow darker. Light is ebbing, like the tide. One of my stones is oval, another, round. Earth’s axis of rotation is 23.5B off vertical. As she treads her elliptical path around the sun, she points first her northern then her southern hemisphere toward it. Starting June 21st, the sun loses altitude in our noontime sky, and this inexorable progression of shortening days and lengthening nights climaxes on December 21st, the winter solstice, the “sun still” day, when our star halts its southbound journey and turns north once more so that light, like the tide, can flow forth again.

Ignorant of earth’s tilt and the science of rotation, our ancestors were frightened this time of year. What if the sun keeps going? What if it never comes back? Rituals evolved to catch it, hold it, convince it to return, celebrate when it did. Today we know the sun will reverse its pendulum swing without our help, yet, the Hanukkah Menorah, the Scandinavian Yule Log, the candles of Advent: all our festivals during this season are efforts to push back the cold and dark with warmth and light. One of my personal rituals is an evening drive through the countryside to look at all the houses. So bold, those sparkles and shimmers. So brave, those glimmers and glints. So defiant, all that shining, when night presses close around and threatens to snuff it out.

This Christmas morning it will be fifty years since, in my sixth year, my father died, so I know something about the dimming. As do we all. Earth rotates daily at 1,000 miles an hour, revolves yearly at 67,000 miles an hour. Amidst all this spinning and tilting the losses keep coming, the griefs pile up, and what are we in an ocean of trouble but small stones scraping in an ineluctable tide? Rejoice, I say, and rejoice again, because in this briny swash and backwash our opaque substance wears away, making us, with every day that passes, more translucent.

Quick!  Make a list of book or song or movie titles with the word ‘moon’ in them. This chuck of lifeless rock carries our hearts and longings with her on her 28 day journey.  She governs our plantings and our thievings, our emotions and our tides.  Earth spins round and round.  Earth’s oceans spin round and round.  Heaping up towards the moon, emptying out away from the moon.  Increasing with her light, diminishing with her strength.  High tide, low tide.  Lunar push, lunar pull.

Through my lifetime I have known three moons.  In New York City I could hardly find her among the street lights.  Amidst the ebb and flow of traffic and ambition, what power could the moon possess?

In the high desert of northern New Mexico, the moon was sterling silver in an onyx sky.  I gauged her size with words I’d formerly reserved for olives: gargantuan, colossal, mammoth.  She gave me a house of baked clay.  Plunked me down in a barren, cratered landscape uncannily like her own: the white sandstone of Plaza Blanca.  Flecked with silver mica.  Pocked with ancient rocks.  Even at her first quarter, the very ground swelled with light.  By the full, I who had once dismissed the moon learned my own insignificance.

Now I live in St. Mary’s County, which juts into the Bay across three rivers like a long narrow pier.  The sky is a blue-black mussel shell; the moon, its mother-of-pearl glow.  Rising over our rippled, wavering waters, she sees herself reflected in a thousand silver chips.  Hears herself discussed in a thousand conversations: between soft night breezes and sea grass; murmuring insects and creaking pines; dry leaves and prowling critters; waves and the foam-gilt shore.

This is her family.  She is at home here. Her magnetic fingers twine throughout our countryside, pulling at our rivers, tugging at our creeks.  At the syzygy, the new and the full, the moon’s face turns directly on us and we receive the abundant spring tides.  At the quadrature, when her face slants away, our neap tides are scanty.  More reliable than any legal contract, these risings and fallings.  A treasure continually replenishing itself.  An inheritance beyond price.

Who can lay claim to the moon?  In my lifetime I have known three.  This last, over southern Maryland, is the moon of my belonging.  I give it to you, hoping she will help you discover that place beside which there is no other:  home.

The gift of water.  Like silver or silk or tumbling jazz notes.  In diamond dashes or foam-flecked tiers.  In sheets of lead, on cloudy days, or pocked and roughened by some storm.

The gift of sky.  How legion, those blues: azure, cerulean, cornflower, Wedgwood, robin’s egg, sapphire.  How changeable, those clouds: wisps, tatters, billows, or even, at sunset, carnelian paving stones.

The gift of earth, whether carefully cultivated (lawn, field, rose arbor) or wild and profuse (thick woods, ivy-clotted cliffs, leaping deer).

In college, our class read “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.  I clearly remember scoffing at those famous last two lines:  “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”  How stupid, I thought.  How can people say this guy’s a great poet, I wondered, when he’s foisting nonsense off on us like something we can rely on?

I was young, and angry.  I wanted life to make sense – it didn’t.  I wanted certainty – none could be found.  Keats’ words disappointed me, epitomizing all the broken promises and frustrated hopes the world had so far proffered, so I marched off to find a more substantial truth.

Flash forward.  November 2007.  I’m walking somewhere, and I’m startled by the vivid purple tips of a seed-blown thistle flower.  Or maybe I’m driving, and the shape of a drifting cloud catches me off-guard.  Or I’m sitting in my back yard, and some bird pipes up with a burst of song, and for one instant I’m freed from my tiny self’s illusory baggage of broken promises and frustrated hopes, catapulted to a place that’s large and real and true.  I need to name it, the place where I’ve been, so I smile and think, “O, that’s beautiful.”

Flash back.  1621.  Plymouth, Massachusetts.  A harvest festival.  A handful of immigrants and native-born folk, come together to sup on what, together, they have been given.  Never mind the table, heavy laden with bounteous fare, it’s the place that really matters, because the beauty in which we dwell is the truth that dwells within us.  It’s the American dream.  It’s the American challenge.  It’s the one thing that can take us beyond red or blue states of mind, beyond politicians’ broken promises or the frustrated hopes of bogus social agendas.

Flash forward.  Some future Thanksgiving Day.  “O beautiful,” they’re singing, from sea to shining sea.  The native-born and the immigrants, the black and the white, the yellow, the red, the brown folk.  Poor and rich, young and old, all come together – like us – to give thanks for what, together, we have been given.

Small wonder, then, that this little crimson chit is a state bird seven times over.  Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virgina have all claimed the Cardinal as their own, and I must confess, I’ve been smitten, too.  My lips just can’t help it, they need to stretch from ear to ear as soon as my eyes register his allegro arrival on branch or feeder.  I love the way he’s sharp all over: pointy crest, razor-edged whistle; quick, keen snaps of tail and head.  Never still, this bird, never dull.  Always a spark of bright and cheer.

In the 1800′s, Cardinals were confined to the American southeast.  Prized for their color and song, they were trapped and sold as cage birds to European markets, a lively trade that terminated with the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1918.  As human settlement changed dense forests into bushes and parks, the bird’s range expanded, and now, wherever the annual precipitation tops 16 inches, he zips around on a feathered wavelength of 750 nanometers.

Cardinals are helpful.  They eat weed seeds and harmful insects, including the voracious seventeen-year locust.  Both sexes cooperate equally in child-rearing, not unusual in the avian world, but what is unique to the species is the way males and females share song phrases, stitching together their separate patches to make one melodious quilt.  Not a bad model. Cooperation leads to peace, peace leads to joy, who knows where joy might lead.

I looked it up in the dictionary.  It means “a vivid emotion of pleasure arising from a sense of well-being.”  The root word is joie, jewel.  A joyous spirit sparkles, a glad heart shines, a ruby-red bird flashes forth what’s hidden in the secret heart of the world.  Season by season.  A stun of scarlet on snow.  A surprise of crimson on budding branch, in dense foliage.  A fat feathered berry at harvest time.  All year round.

So I have a plan.  The cardinal will be my decimal point for happiness, my bookmark for gladness.  Every time I smile to see one I’ll remember to rush right out and share a song with someone, or beat back some weeds, or vote for universal health care, or put an end to war, I don’t know, all it has to do is make someone feel a little better, a little safer, then, flick, flash, fizz, there’s a dash more joy in the world.