Category Archives: Weather +Climate

Aging, Third Phase, Travel, Weather +Climate

NoSnowBirds

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Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

They leave.  This is the time.  Lois, our cleaning lady, poked her head in and said, “Good-bye.  See you in April.”  Mark and Elizabeth leave on the 29th for Grass Valley in California.  Many others are already gone to Florida or Arizona or New Mexico or Mexico.

We call them snowbirds, though it should be nosnowbirds, since they fly away at dropping temperatures and clouds of frozen moisture.  The reasons they go are diverse, I imagine, but cluster around icy roads, slick sidewalks, the uninviting nature of cold air for being outside.

It makes sense.  At a certain age, one I’ve reached, driving on roads and navigating sidewalks slick with ice and polished snow can be scary.  To get outside requires more thought in dress and more intention.  Just going out for a stroll can mean preparation. There is, too, the lure of a different place.  The beaches of Florida, the culture of the Southwest and Mexico.  A way to break up the year, give it a punctuation when work no longer provides it.

Still.  I love the snow, the cold, the quiet, the coming of the inside season.  The holiseason makes a good deal more intuitive sense with distinct seasonal changes, seasonal changes I find crucial to my own spiritual practice.  Putting the garden to bed, letting it rest for a season plus also feels right to me.  I would not want to continue my gardening season past the end of September, early October.

No.  We’ll stay.  Here.  In Andover.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Myth and Story, Weather +Climate

Winter Is Coming

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Samhain                                                             Winter Moon

Winter Solstice.  It comes with silent steps, the moon shining through leafless trees, scattering the snow with shadows.  This is a moment between one turn and the next, a still point, a dark still point out of which will come light, enough light to thaw the ground, lure plants from beneath the earth, give them strength and plump up their fruits.  But now, this night, is the culmination of darkness coming toward us one minute at a time until we reach the longest night of the year.

This waning of the light has killed back the plants of summer, shucked the leaves off the trees, frozen the rain so it falls as snow.  This is the season that shows the other face of nature.  This is earth as a receiver of the dead, as a particle disaggregator, a rapacious devourer of life.  Earth as scavenger, cavern, dark sea bottom.  This is the earth as whole, not only giving, but also taking.

When Hades comes for Persephone, he takes life back inside the earth.  He changes her, makes her a part of his realm.  In this marriage of Hades and Persephone we see death preceding life as the Mexica poet said.

In the dark and the quiet of the Winter Solstice night we can draw near to this truth.  We can know that even our own death will do no more than take us back to the earth from which we came and that even that death will not be final as our consciousness is born anew with each birth and our physical self is born anew as plant and animal.  What more wonder do we need at this time of year, in this, the Holiseason?

(Hades and Persephone:  King and Queen of the Underworld)

Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

Halfway to the Pole; Halfway to the Equator.

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Samhain                                                              Winter Moon

As the nights grow longer and the temperature drops further, the silence here becomes holy.  The weather of the arctic brings with it the isolation of the pole.  Andover sits halfway between the equator and the pole, on the 45th degree of latitude.  In the winter months we lean toward the pole; in the summer months we lean toward the equator.

Also, our position in the rough center of the North American land mass means that our weather has no direct oceanic modification; our weather comes to us raw and at no time is it rawer than during meteorological winter, December 1st to March 1st.

That’s why the winter solstice is such an important holiday for me.  It is the moment when our polar relationship comes into play with the earth’s orbit around the sun.  Our position relative to the sun created by our tilted axis and our position relative to the sun created by our orbit reinforce each other to create a dramatic time of cold darkness, silence and wonder both unmediated.  It is a pure moment in the year, a suspension in night dominated by the arctic.

 

 

Anoka County, Art and Culture, Great Wheel, Holidays, Weather +Climate

Switching Rails

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Samhain                                                               Winter Moon

In late January when this kind of cold usually comes a few days of it can bring on an intense desire to be outside, be anywhere other than inside.  This is the condition often called cabin fever.

Having this deep, long cold spell come up front in winter, though, has not produced the same kind of grousing and low murmurs as a January dip.  This is still bracing.  Or, well, what do you expect?  We live here, don’t we?  Ruth, our financial advisor, said a mutual friend, Larry Schmidt, the late investigative reporter for WCCO, told her winter cut gang activity out for a season which he said, “Gives us an edge over L.A. and Detroit.”

This kind of seasonal change switches rails in the roundhouse of the mind.  No doubting now that the growing season is far behind us and the earth’s orbit has swung us into different astronomical territory.  We can concentrate on activities like snowshoeing, bird feeding, igloo building, cross-country skiing, ice-fishing, dog-sledding.  There’s even the few, the hardy who have sails rigged on “boats” with ice-skate like runners.  Others will go winter camping, hiking in the boreal forest.  And, yes, there will be snowmobilers, too.

Some will concentrate on feasting, reading, indoor games.  This is the concert and theater and dance season, too.  And all those holidays with their bright lights and festive music and gift giving and family and friend get togethers.

And the cold says winter.  Time for all that winter offers.

Minnesota, Weather +Climate

Our Time

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Samhain                                                                    Winter Moon

A sickle moon, 7 inches of snow, still fresh, -11 on the weather system’s display.  Yes. There is a purity in a northern winter, a clarity and a straight-forwardness that I sought out when I moved 44 years ago to Appleton, Wisconsin.  Indiana winters could never decide on cold or chill, snow or slush, rain or ice.  Walking in January with wet feet through a crunchy mush of water.  Well, that was the nadir.

That first winter, 1969, we had several feet of snow and the temperature got down to -20 and stayed there.  That was what I wanted, a season not afraid to declare its intentions, to arrive and stay present until time to give way to spring.  Since then I’ve lived through many notable winters and I’ve enjoyed all of them.

The motor vehicle has been my only source of displeasure.  Streets too narrow, snow and ice too built up, wheels spinning, starters whining and clicking.  Speeds well beyond what physics says makes sense.  Snowshoes.  Yes.  Sorels.  Yes.  Cross-country skis.  Yes.  Engines and tires and heavy metal.  No.

Other than that.  What can beat a several day snowstorm with flakes drifting, then coming in on the slant, drifting again.  Building up, caressing the landscape until it changes into something altogether new.  A newness with curves and sweeps and slopes and fewer barriers and boundaries.  And blizzards with the snow coming across the desert expanses like the fabled sand storms of the Sahara.

Even the danger of it.  It’s possible to lose your way here in a serious storm, wander off into a field, say, while only 50 feet from home.  It happens, not every winter, but often. People leave their cars, try to make it to safety.  The cold can kill.  -11, which it is right now, is far below survivability for the human body.  Trips have a somber side to them, a reasonable caution is necessary.

This is the human animal outside its geographic bounds.  We’re not polar bears or even bunnies like I photographed the other afternoon.  We’re creatures of the warmer regions where our hairless bodies can thrive with no clothing.  None at all.  Imagine being a bushman faced with a Minnesota winter night.  Or a native American or a pioneer for that matter.

Winter is why we don’t have to keep Minnesota for Minnesotans.  In Colorado there are license plates that read Colorado native.  I’m sure they’re not, really, but I understand. They don’t want to share.  Hawai’i doesn’t encourage immigration either and Portland has a don’t move here campaign.

Our quality of life meets and exceeds all three places but we have this northern temperate climate winter and if you don’t want to live here, it weeds you out.  Sends you packing for sunnier places.  And that’s ok.  Makes sure if you’re here, for the most part, you’re here because you want to be.

Weather +Climate

The Storm: After

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Samhain                                                              Winter Moon

Brother Mark writes of hoping the A.C. continues to work in his Muyhail, Saudi Arabia classroom while Gordon Hommes, a Two Harbors weather watcher, had a photo of his home posted on the updraft blog:

Snowed in near Two Harbors. Gordon Hommes December 4, 2013

35-inches-twh-630x223

 

Ramsey, our near neighbor, reported 7.5 inches and I expect that’s about right for us.  Beautiful here.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Weather +Climate

Falling

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Samhain                                                       Winter Moon

Only 4 days into meteorological winter we have significant snow falling and will watch thedecember 4 snow and cold 2013 temperatures plummet starting tonight.  I have a snow day feeling, that sort of enforced healthy hooky moment that comes when you realize transportation just won’t work.

Of course, I have no job to not show up to, no school to miss, but decades of positive experiences in weather like this has me snuggled into the computer, ready for movies and tv, catching up on some reading.  Maybe some snow shoeing.

Speaking of jobs, I forgot to mention meeting Linsey at the Ghorka Palace Monday night. In her last week of a 2 and a half year stint there she told she was looking of internships in museums throughout the state.  An anthropology and Greek major, a visit to the British Museum at the age of 16 focused her.  Her “big dream” is to work there, far far from now, but at some point.  She wants to be a curator.  It was fun to see the vision and hope of a bright young person.  May she do well.

(the rosetta stone at the British Museum)