Do you ever think,
Fine,
I'll try and meditate again,
Even though I'm sure it won't do any good?
I'll be honest,
I do.
Sometimes the last thing in the world I want to do is meditate.
But that's usually when I need it most.
So I can let go of all that is going on in my head and heart and reset.
See things anew.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
Often in my creative writing classes,
I will ask my students what their favorite and least favorite words are.
Just the other day,
My students said,
Luscious and willow were favorites,
As was batholith,
Which I learned is a layer of the earth.
A perennial least favorite is moist.
One student said doozy was a least favorite,
A word I use all of the time.
Now,
A word that sounds as ugly as it is in reality is snurt.
Anyone living in a cold climb will know what snurt is.
It's when the snow gets old and coated in dirt.
Nothing pristine or beautiful about it.
It is U-G-L-Y,
Ugly.
And snurt usually arrives when we are already tired of winter,
But still have months of it to go.
It was probably hard enough to get yourself to settle and meditate.
You might be thinking to yourself,
Why in the world do I want to think about snurt?
Because most of us humans long for the new,
The fresh,
The wondrous,
And snurt could be seen as the ordinary,
The long,
Straight,
And boring road of life,
Where what was beautiful and new has grown worn and dirty.
Snurt could also be the thing,
Whatever that might be,
That refuses to go away.
Snurt could also be seen as the transitional,
The liminal,
The space between.
Many who are wise see the liminal as a holy place,
A thin place,
Where the divine and the ordinary brush up against one another.
If you have ever seen a pile of snurt,
You might be wondering what I've been smoking.
And if you haven't,
Trust me,
As I said,
Snurt is u-g-l-y,
Ugly.
So how could it be a liminal space,
Where the divine and the ordinary brush up against one another?
This winter,
The more I look at snurt,
The more I see it has its own beauty.
You just have to be willing to look hard to see it.
Not even that.
You have to look at this ordinary thing with a sense of delight and wonder.
And when you do,
You might notice that there are often icicles hanging off the piles,
Icicles that catch and play with the golden light.
Sometimes there are hollows in the snurt piles,
And you can almost imagine a little rabbit curling up inside.
Or it could remind you of when you were a kid and you created hamster-like havens of tunnels under the piles of snow.
Sometimes the snow in these piles has melted and refrozen so many times that it has created thin and delicate flakes of ice that look like the lace my grandmother used to crochet.
But you have to look closely to see this.
You have to look kindly to see this.
You have to look at the pile of snurt and see it as a place where snow that was born close to the stars came down and said,
Hello dirt.
How lovely to meet you.
Namaste.
