Read, Write, Love, Repeat

There’s a hush and stillness that comes with snow, especially in our lacking-snow-readiness corner of North Texas. It’s somehow a novelty to us: streets empty, covered in a scrim of white, as yet undisturbed by the tracks of the intrepid. Early morning silence rests deeper than usual, and my lessons of stillness and “wintering” gleaned over the past months rouse within me; they yawn and stretch, tapping my shoulder to remind me they’re here, important and hard-won.

I nestle into my beloved armchair, steaming coffee at my elbow, having awoken to the first (of who knows how many or few) snow of the winter- of the year in fact. Thoughts pour through my favorite fountain pen onto the pages of a new journal, underlining the bone-deep need I have for stillness and silence, not just on the edge of a new year, but always.

Before the world wakes around me, before tires mark the perfect white of our street, before I begin working through today’s to-do’s, before the silence is broken by all the voices that clamor, I am still. Listening. Seeking again in the frozen morning a bit of the anchor of who I am, Whose I am. What He made me to do.

It’s been almost 4 1/2 years to the day since I last posted a blog. Yikes. In my lack of stillness in the intervening time I listened to the voices of doubt in my head, the voices that dismissed my ramblings, the voices that I allowed to stop my voice. And yet I am again reminded: because I still have breath, I still have words.

What kind of English teacher doesn’t write at least something beyond lesson plans? This kind, apparently. But. In the stillness of now, I feel the restless words rustling beneath the surface, pushing back against those voice-stealing voices.

So. I will let the words come out and play again, and begin to make some tracks in the snow.