February 10, 2025

As you sit with this scene
what stirs to life?
What memories come to mind?
What associations do you make?
What feelings surface?
What moods are generated?

I grew up in scenes like this one.
Riding/driving past winter lakes and ponds.
In the country of the Mississippi Delta.

Isolation but not loneliness,
more of a somber source of reflection,
waiting for the world to warm up
and spring to come to life.

As a child, I observed life and seasons
without judgment or preference.

I liked the closeness of winter scenes,
the closed-in-ness
not inviting disturbances of any kind.
A rock thrown into the lake, for instance,
would have been an unwelcome interruption 
of the silence and stillness,
which constitute a whole,
and is complete and perfect just as it is.

I think I relished and enjoyed the peace
of scenes like this, and saw them as balm
on the wounds of life.
I took solace in them then, and do so now,
taking refuge in them
because of the absence of people.

People in my childhood were not to be trusted,
and I walked among them as invisible as I could be.
Enjoying scenes like this one for the freedom 
they offered me to just be without anyone to give me grief.

All of this would not have surfaced
if I hadn't asked you to reflect on the scene
and see what comes to mind.
Which makes sitting with scenes, 
or dropping into them as we walk through them,
aware of what is to be aware of in them
and what they bring up in us,
deepens, expands, enlarges us and our awareness
of ourselves--
which is a healthy practice to take up,
showing us more of who we are than we were aware of
before we began to explore the impacts our scenes
have upon us as we engage them, reflect on them,
think about them.