It’s cold. So cold the school just called to say they are starting late tomorrow if they start at all (they will re-evaluate in the morning). So cold the livestock sale barn where my husband works canceled their sale in anticipation. It’s only -4 degrees right now, but the “feels like” temperature is -21 and it’s supposed to get a lot colder before it gets warm again.
Meanwhile, we’ve had a very sick kid with a mystery virus. She’s tested negative for all the standard stuff but is as sick and miserable as she’s ever been. Our world has narrowed to getting through the chores, tending to illness, looking out the window and trying to reassure ourselves that this too shall pass.
Lying in bed last night, holding my furnace-y, feverish girl as we waited for the Tylenol to kick in, I told her stories of my own childhood: my tiny backyard, the city blocks that went on for miles in every direction, the towns that turned into new towns without there ever being a break for countryside views.
“Can you imagine?” I asked, and she couldn’t.
The truth is, I can barely believe it, and I lived it. I attended a meeting recently during which we ended up in conversation about people who can live on the prairie and people who can’t or won’t. For some, the wide, open sky is an instant reminder of our human minuteness, and that can be intimidating or an immediate access point for divine revelation. For other people, the prairie is just another view to glance at from behind the car windows as it flashes past. There’s no reason to stop.
I find the long views around here both intimidating and revelatory, probably because revelations can be inherently intimidating — the reckoning of my own finiteness against the backdrop of the infinite horizon is a lot to metabolize. But honestly, I often feel my main experience of being human in this place is that of overwhelm — the overwhelm of the vast beauty, the harsh and unpredictable weather, the distance between how I grew up and how I live now. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Human-ing can be really hard, and that is especially true on the plains in winter.
For solace, while my daughter sleeps on my shoulder, I’ve been reading a book about Celtic Christianity called “Water from an Ancient Well.” In it, the author, Kenneth McIntosh, writes extensively about the “Carmina Gadelica,” a series of books devoted to hymns, poems, songs and prayers collected from rural Scotland during the 19th century. Many modern ideas about Celtic Christianity come from these volumes, and they describe a land-based version of Christianity that is familiar and distinct from how most modern American Christians practice their faith.
McIntosh includes examples of the many prayers devoted to everyday living: a prayer to say upon waking, a prayer for banking the fire at night and many prayers for chore time. Praying was interwoven into every activity, even — or maybe especially — the most mundane.
I was thinking about all this as I crossed the narrow field with my forkfuls of hay to feed the sheep. The snow covering the path is slick from my frequent passages, but just beside that path is a second one made from the hay that’s fallen from the pitchfork one strand at a time. Neither path follows a straight line. There’s a broken branch I swerve to avoid, a slim grove of trees I have to walk around and, of course, the first gate to the field that I have to walk through sideways because it is frozen half-open. But the paths are perfectly symmetrical, curving through the obstacles.
I’ve been walking on the hay path the last two days, as the original path is too slippery now, and all these things feel related — illness, deep cold, walking through life in a state of overwhelm — but especially how prayers spoken on the journey land gracefully beside you until a new, safer path emerges just when you need it most.
