winter's promise

Winter Solstice has come and gone. The sun is reborn yet young, too young to warm Mother's northern children. We are chilling amid the snow and cloudy skies. We watch the calender. The modern calender says the solstice is the beginning of Winter. I see it as the beginning of the end of winter. It is MidWinter, such it has been for our ancestors long knowledge. Who told the weather forcasters they could change that for their convience?
I consider it the turning point, tipping the balance back toward spring. Calenders are the invention of humankind. Nature cares nothing for such fripperies. Winter is here and intends to stay a while.
Yet the sun is reborn and growing. It marks the beginning of the end of winter, not the beginning of the beginning.
Paradox and puzzels are natures toys and winters especially. Dare the cold. Dare to survive. Be strong. Her living children are tempered not in heat but in winters frozen breath. warm breath within, cold fingers without, her children snug down to stay the race. Dare to survive.
Den, nest, burrow, or a big overstuffed chair, we have stuffed larders for the season of testing. The strong and the good planers survive, and the lucky. Fur and feather alike they await the promise of spring at winters far side.

A hawk took the squirrel. Right out of the garden. squirrel was on the edge of the dividing line between garden and frozen grass. She was seeking peanuts. In the open she became prey of a thunderbolt of hunger. Wild and fierce and greatly daring the hawk is a huge female redtail. I have seen her circling. She is a city hawk and wise to the ways of city squirrels.
So now my tree is empty. Squirrel had not so much as a chance to squeek. Hawk struck and broke squirrels back, then neatly severed the spine at the base of squirrels skull. Quick, concise and elegantly deadly is hawk.
So hawk will live. A new squirrel will take up residence. perhaps that other visitor. The one of exquisite caution who wants peanuts.
I meditate upon Hawks and Squirrles. I remember the words of Big Sur poet Robinson Jeffers: "What but the wolfs tooth whittled so fine the fleet limbs of the antelope, what but hunger so jeweled the great goshawks eye..."
So it is with squirrels and hawks. Mother Natures imperative. home