There is within each of us, I believe, a push toward creating beauty. If not beauty, then certainly something interesting or novel. Something that takes the raw materials before our very eyes and makes something new or permanent, something to delight or challenge. It is our birthright as those whose existence was formed from the mud and stardust of the original blessing of Creation. This One who breathed us all into being also implanted the genetic code that thrusts us toward creativity.
There are signs and wonders of this all around. In museums and books and on stages. In classrooms and hospitals. In offices and living rooms. Everywhere humans are something is also being created. There are stories of the early settlers in prairie sod houses who, at the end of a tiresome day of toil, pull from the rafters a quilting frame and spend the dark hours of the evening stitching together scraps of fabric, leftover pieces of clothing or feed sacks to create a blanket of beauty and warmth. This idea and others like it always amaze me and fill me with such a sense of hope for we beings who walk upright.
During these cold winter months, the raw materials available to us for creating beauty could seem like a vast and frigid wasteland. White for as far as the eye can see. Windows seeping freezing air. Trees bare of leaves and the landscapes void of color. Lakes and rivers are frozen over and no movement of water fills our sphere of vision. It would seem the world is static, dead, without hope of any creative act.
But for those who visited the St.Paul Winter Carnival or the Minneapolis Lakes Loppet we know this is not true. There are those among us who see ice and snow and cannot resist the urge to create. These winter artists take up pick and saw, planer and torch and fashion beauty out of the frigid scene in front of them. Through a process of vision, melting and subtraction something emerges out of frozen water and the moisture that falls from the sky. Amazing! Walking past the sculptures created from ice, I marveled at our human ability, our deep need, to create. Why not just walk past ice or snow and let it be? Why not just wait it out till the sun turns its face in our direction once again and brings forth the green and golden gifts of spring and summer?
This human need to create beauty, to respond to the land and landscape that holds us, runs deeper even than the challenges of weather or season. Perhaps it is because we have seen the structure and uniqueness of a snowflake or have heard the living, breathing groan of ice under our feet as we walk across a lake, that demands our response, our connection. Perhaps it is the awe that wells up in us as we witness the rainbow colors of sundogs that have graced the morning skies of these frigid days. All of these glimpses of the Creation at work and the connection we feel with the Creator push us toward response and relationship. In this beauty is often born.
Today may not find us carving sculptures out of ice or building snow figures that dance in our yard. But today may find us paying attention to the way light plays on the snow as day progresses. There may be the opportunity to notice the crystals with their jagged edges forming lace on our windows. Whether creating beauty or responding to it, let us all give thanks this day for those moments that remind us that we are all children of the Great Artist. Perhaps our response with lead us in those wild and wonderful footsteps that brought us to this here, this now.
Blessed be.
