The Saturday evening before Easter Sunday, a quiet, gentle snow began to fall. The flakes were fat and heavy. “That’s Minnesota snow,” my husband said, “Lots of moisture.” But it didn’t look like Minnesota snow to me, it looked like Hollywood snow, too big and soft to be real. Certainly not the tiny, gritty sand balls of ice we usually call snowflakes around here. And it was falling straight down, not sideways, another unusual circumstance.
It also seemed appropriate. I grew up in the Christian tradition where starting with Good Friday, the Saturday before Easter was the quietest time. Sunday was a time for great rejoicing, but Friday and Saturday were a time for the opposite, something more like lamentation, a time of introspection, and not always comfortable introspection.
Honestly, as a kid it felt really scary to be faced with something so dark and heavy every year. Something that even the bright hymns of Easter morning never quite overcame for my childhood self.
I’ve been experiencing a lot of big shifts within myself lately, a lot of feelings that I haven’t found language for yet. That also feels scary. But, there was something unexpectedly healing about that soft, beautiful snowfall on Saturday, the air so thick with white even the normal sounds of ranch life were muffled and hushed.
It felt like a promise that the gateway for rebirth and renewal doesn’t have to be terrifying — which I know intellectually, but still feel scared to experience myself.
Saturday evening was also when I was supposed to record an installment for my newest project, a show I put up every other week on YouTube called The Perkins County Almanac. It’s meant to be a chance to talk about country livin’, cultivating joy and community through the seasons, with a wee bit of folk music for fertilizer. It is also meant to be lighthearted, which as the above paragraphs illustrate, has never been my forte.
Up until the minute I pressed record, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to say for the show. All week I’d been considering the difference between what it means to hold brave space versus safe space. I’m a people pleaser most of the time, and I like that about myself. I want people to feel safe and comfortable and loved in my presence.
My dream would be to own a restaurant where everyone ate great, home-raised food for free sitting together at one long table. But lately, I’ve been thinking that before I can create safe space where all feel welcome and beloved, I need to create a brave space where people, including me, are able to say why they may not feel safe in the first place.
I have no idea how to do that … yet. But in the quiet snowfall of Saturday night, I found myself rejoicing in emergent possibility.
Meanwhile, every time we have a dry winter, like the one we just experienced, we start to worry about drought. But a wet spring can feel like one long disaster as we battle the elements to keep newborn babies alive.
This spring is looking to be one of those wet and difficult ones. I don’t think my husband has slept more than two hours in a row for the past two weeks, and he’s already had to saddle a horse and ride out to check the herd in wet snow and sleet, so he’s damp all the way through his clothes before he has even started.
Early in my time on the ranch, when we had a similarly dry winter followed by an extraordinarily blizzard-like and then rainy spring, I wrote the following: “What can we do? If it’s not one thing, it’s another — or so it always seems … What can we do except say: Glory be to the waters that are rising. Glory be to the mud tracked in after the day’s work is done … .”
Now I would add: Glory be to the disasters, to the illnesses, to the darkness before the dawn because it is always the darkness of the womb, not the tomb, an awakening to what was impossible until quite suddenly, it wasn’t impossible anymore.
