by Susan Chernak McElroy

Created on: December 13, 2008

When we make our New Year's resolutions, we don't normally say, "I resolve to make my life empty this year." When we pray, we don't pray to be unfilled or vacant. I am defining emptiness as that unsettling place between the end of one project or dream and the beginning of another, limbo land, when soil lies unplanted and cold and waiting for spring. Personally, I am a very poor student of emptiness. In fact, "empty" often shows up as a four-letter word in my personal dictionary-a curse word-because emptiness frequently feels like a curse to me.

Winter is full of gifts that teach about the value of emptiness, and of emptying ourselves to life. She has sent you an invitation. Did you get it yet? It is a blank card, nicely textured, with nothing written inside.

My "card" is dusted with snow. The trees quiver in the winter wind and I tell myself they must be shivering. I know I am. The cold in Indiana is a wetter kind of cold. It seeps into the bone. My hands are sore and stiff. So is the rest of me. Across the forest floor, squirrels rush about, leaving footprints like alphabet letters across the clear white paper of snow. I am like them, I tell myself, but I do most of my scurrying indoors. I scurry from kitchen to office, from bedroom to living room.

My mind scurries from bills to books to chores to mental shopping lists, to what I should have said over the phone to the health insurance clerk. My scurrying keeps me warm, and it keeps me good and distracted from the deeper gifts winter keeps for me in the very center of her huge, intimidating snow pile. She crafts one of these for me every winter, and plops it down in the very middle of her winter ground. I don't like digging into this pile of nothingness, which is what she wants me to do. It is cold, and the snow walls could collapse at any time. It feels like dangerous ground, and I have no idea why.

In the center of the snow pile-if I get there-are invisible gifts that I grope for, and sometimes don't realize I've found until I discover them hidden in my pockets many seasons later: small bangles and snippets of patience, strength, wisdom, irony, paradox, and all the warm and creative emotions that rest silently in the heart of the pile. I like these gifts. I appreciate every little scrap of them I have accumulated over many winters. But I have to crawl through this white emptiness to get to them, and sometimes it scares me so much that I just have to scurry to the garage, or the living room, or the laundry to

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>