CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a Place of
Winter for the Years of Winter… ©
The daisies are dancing wildly. They should, since they
are wild daisies, even though they are in our yard.
The wind is helping them to dance. Our yard is surrounded
by thickets of low bushes and tall trees—oaks and birches and especially pines.
In the thickets live squirrels and birds and chipmunks and rabbits and skunks.
So we have owls and foxes and an occasional coyote.
And
deer. They have paths through the thickets and into our yard. I have tried to
teach them to help me maintain the yard by eating dandelions. These are not
Carhartt deer, however. They are Waldorf-Astoria deer. Nieman-Marcus deer. They
eat only expensive, cultivated flowers—roses and hostas and such. But at least
they leave the wild daisies.
The
wind comes in from the top, over the trees, from every direction at once, so
the dance of the wild daisies is a constant swirl. In their wild dance they
mock the manicured and poisoned lawns they see lying limp around them.
It’s a little more difficult to mow our yard each year,
because we have a few more daisies each year, and they patch in different spots.
Sometimes Helen gathers a vase of daisies for our table. Mostly, though, they
just hang around in the yard. I mow around them. In the wind, our yard is a
daisy dance hall.
As I watch them, I remember times when I danced like
that—at the weddings of our daughters, with our granddaughter after she scored
the winning basket in a fifth grade game, when Keith Smart hit the shot that
won the 1987 NCAA basketball tourney, when the doctor declared there was no
cancer left in our grandson.
It is said that we should dance like no one is watching. The
daisies don’t care if anyone is watching; they just dance. I say: Dance like a
daisy.
John Robert McFarland
The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron
Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where people are Yoopers, a word in
the new Merriam-Webster dictionary, and life is defined by winter even in the
summer! [This phrase is explained in the post for March 20, 2014.]
You don’t have to bookmark or favorite the CIW URL to
return here. Just Google Christ In Winter and it will show up at the top of the
page.
I have also started an author blog, about writing, in
preparation for the publication, by Black Opal Books, of my novel, VETS, in late 2014 or early 2015. http://johnrobertmcfarland-author.blogspot.com/
I tweet as yooper1721.
Thanks John! May you continue to dance for many more days.
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