I knew the weather forecast for today and I was not particularly pleased with it. Snow. Like many, perhaps even like most, I am at the end of my fascination with snow. As I wrote yesterday, I am ready for green. So as I looked outside in the early morning darkness I was not overjoyed with the sight of white. Trying not to look too often out the window, I moved around the house, reading the paper, drinking my coffee, getting ready for the day’s meetings that were ahead.

And then I walked outside and was stopped in my tracks. Silence held the morning captive. Even the cars moving by seemed to have muted tires. My eyes moved from the heavy, wet snow on the ground upwards until they were startled with the overwhelming beauty of the snow clinging to the tree branches. I stood in my driveway looking up and down the street, nestled in a lacy, white doily. Walking underneath the maple tree that brings us such joy when it turns brilliant red in the fall, I could see the buds peaking out from under the chantilly flakes. "Not yet, not yet," they seemed to be saying, "But soon, very soon."

My son who has just returned from Mexico and is also finished with winter came outside to head to school. We stopped and looked together at the trees holding what may perhaps be their last heavy coat of snow. "I always think I should take pictures on days like this," he said. I silently agreed and tried to memorize the scene to save for one of those hot, humid days in August when we will be finished with summer.

The great gift of living in a place that moves through the seasons is that you have the opportunity, the blessing to notice the cycles of Creation. Birth, life, death, rebirth, over and over again. Sometimes we are ready when those cycles arrive in our lives, and sometimes we want to hold them off or stop them all together. Other times we want them to come sooner than would be best. Trusting in the internal rhythms of seed and soil, rain and sun, wind and breath, we come to be surprised by the beauty of it all. Always on our way from ‘not yet’ to ‘very soon’ and finally to the amazing ‘now’, we are held in the wonder of the world.

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted." Ecclesiastes 3:1-2