Seeing into one’s “one nature,” far from being self-analysis – as if one were an object – is the perception, the experience of Nature as it manifests itself in me, outside me. This seeing-into is at the same time the leap out of the isolation of the Me into the community of being and things, in the absolute present, the Absolute Presence.

Frederick Franck

THE SECOND WEEK OF LATE WINTER
The Singing Cardinal Moon waxes throughout the week, stimulating new bedding plant sprouts and encouraging cardinals, titmice, blue jays, overwintering robins, and mourning doves to sing. It enters its second quarter on February 2 at 6:13 p.m.

On February 4, the Lower Midwestern day is approximately one hour longer than it was at winter solstice.
The events of Late Winter accumulate, and they create, with their number, Early Spring in just a few weeks. Two events from the past week that clearly point to the season ahead: Rick Donahoe called to say he had watched small spiders spinning webs to catch emerging insects in John Bryon Park during the January Thaw. And Mary Donnelly wrote to tell me that tundra swans had arrived at Muzzie’s Lake in Champagne County.

FEBRUARY HIBERNATION

In the long cold of the last few weeks, I have withdrawn into a fetal, psychic hibernation, reminiscing about childhood and about other retreats I have made from the weather and the world.  This morning, while I was working alone in my attic bindery, listening to the wind and watching the snow, a memory mood from my hermetic high-school years at Holy Cross Seminary came back and settled around me. 

In my mind, I went back to the seminary crypt, a windowless basement of gray stone, with low ceilings, heavy pillars and pointed arches.  Slab altars lined the walls.   The staff of priests, with the students as servers, said daily mass there.

I remembered the complete sense of protection I felt in that place, not only from the winter, but also from hormonal temptations, conflicts with peers, and adolescent longings.  Enveloped in that subterranean chamber and in its ritual, I was the wide-eyed adept.  That dim, consecrated cave was the center of my practice, the passageway to the Path.  The holy sacrifice that I attended was the ultimate act.  The Latin exchange between server and celebrant was the great secret dialogue, the true code, communion with the living and the dead.  

Outside the seminary, in the lonely, secular and snow-covered hills above the river, away from dark and scented dogma and hierarchy, there was no salvation.  But in the crypt I was safe; I belonged as I have never belonged since.  Had I chosen, I could have stayed there forever; I would have been anointed, commissioned magically to change common bread and wine into God.

Here, in my February nostalgia, I ruminate and repent, ponder, finally accept and understand again my old decision.  The monastic season was not my calling.  I had other things to do, other secrets to uncover.  Now one more spring lies ahead with all its promise, and my wintry regrets and my wintry passion for sanctuary will dissolve one more time in the warm sun.