First Day Of Snow

Two nights ago you walked ahead of me as the snow kissed the city streets, there laying a cold blanket that covers the ugly with a glittering field of white diamonds. As you walked I knew your mind was elsewhere, I turned inward, where it was still warm.

Two years ago I returned to Boston in the Summer time. I thought my life was over, that everything I had held so dearly to now gone, ruined, or defiled. My memories of loved ones were tainted with anger. In the anger I found solace, I found a ground I could stand on. The words that were spoken and echoed in my mind could no longer hurt me on this new solid ground. The city streets of Dorchester might be dirty and filled with rats, but here I could stand in Anger and turn my back on the pain.

Two nights ago it snowed, as I watched the litter filled streets become crystallized and perfected, my mind turned inward, where I could still feel the warmth. The warmth had once come from the fire of Anger, but now it came from a deep rooted sense of love, and achievement. Even the dirty color of Anger can be eventually subsided with beauty. My mind drifts in the snow to a quote by C.S. Lewis:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. (From The Four Loves, By C.S. Lewis)

We have a choice in this life, a choice to be safe, or to choose to take those chances that can bring us the greatest of joys and greatest of pains.

In self examination many of my choices have been those to persevere, and at times that has meant closing my heart off to those around me, to dart at the first sign of the risk of being hurt. The danger of self protection is self isolation, to turn our hearts away from our friends, family, and loved ones and serve only ourselves. C.S. Lewis saw this option, and commented on it as a sure way to self damnation. I could fill my life with frivolous activities to escape the silence that exists when we are alone, or I can be open to the love of those around me, I choose to be open; it is an active, daily, and persistent choice for the heart closes fast.

As I walk in the snow and observe the covering of the dark littered streets, I find a sense of peace that I am taking the risks that I am making the effort, and I find gratitude for those around me that continually do the same for me.