Mind of Winter

Poet Wallace Stevens writes “One must have the mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.” His famous poem “The Snow Man” speaks to insignificance with its repetitive use of the word “nothing” three times in the last stanza of the poem. Snow has a way of making me feel insignificant. The tracks my boots make from door to driveway can be covered over with a fresh sprinkling of the white stuff. Snow is quiet. Snow is neutralizing. Each person, each animal, each fledgling winter plant must feel the cold.

Christ tells us in the Gospel of Matthew that the rain falls on the just and the unjust–another great weather equalizer.

Sometimes I try to make more of myself than need be, I try to insert my influence, my ideas, my presence onto scenarios and people who aren’t really looking for anything new. There are people out there who don’t try to build a Snowman out of Snow, who aren’t interested in my recipe for Snow Ice Cream, and who don’t want to commit Stevens’ great poem to memory as I have.

There are those who don’t want to feel their insignificance, and sometimes, lots of times, I am one of those. Oh, the scratching and the clawing and the igloo constructing that commences with a solemn force to make my Winter Wonderland a better place.

We Christians don’t have a corner on hope and non-Christians certainly don’t have the sole patent for discontentment and errant strife, do they? As the rain and the snow fall upon each of us,without preference, I would do good to let the quiet ice of winter just fall and not try to make more or less of it than it is, than I am.

I would do well to look more deeply inside myself and let my story be simply that, however dull or ordinary the light I am cast in. If I have the courage to do that and only that, oh, the comfort that comes from such a decision. The closeness I will feel to God even as I realize how pitiful I am in comparison to the God who created each snowflake uniquely.

It sounds backwards, almost anti-American. It sounds wimpy and fitfully dull–to surrender to the notion that God’s will is not one bit dependent upon me, that life is not a Jack-in-the-Box crank that I turn and turn and turn in order to get a pop-up blessing. To realize “the nothing” that I am, is the first real breath a born-again Christian can take, and then I stop squirming in the Almighty’s Hand. I stop defining myself by comparisons to others. I stop limiting myself to lifestyle trends and manmade, denominational hierarchies.

A Christian should be….I stop saying this at all, except to say a Christian, a child of God, a follower of Christ, should be playful, joyful, a roll-in-the-snow-soul because nothing we can do or not do can taint the Victory that is ours in Jesus Christ. In Stevens’ poem, paradoxically, the word nothing is the most important word in the poem. My “nothing” truly surrendered to God could be the most important something to me.

“For the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and nothing that is.” –Wallace Stevens

-submitted Kerri Snell