Kirkepiscatoid

(Photo by Chris Evans, River to River CWMA, United States)

I had a really nice surprise today. I needed to just step out of the office and stand outside. I get a little cramped up sitting behind my desk. As I stepped out, the most marvelous surprise greeted me. The cottonwood trees in the little patch of "urban woods" behind my parking lot were shedding all their spring "cotton", and the wind was blowing the cotton about. It looked like one of the snowstorms we sometimes get with the big huge wet flakes, creating this wonderful surreal sensation.

As I watched them, my brain was saying, "Oh, look, a big snowstorm!" and I had this sensation that it was SUPPOSED to be cold outside. Yet it was about 70some degrees, and I could feel this wonderful "short circuiting" going on inside of me. I was really having the sensation of standing out in 30some degree weather, my "core" self sensing "cold", yet the wind on my face feeling "warm"! It was kind of a marvelous feeling simply from the "sur-reality" of it all.

I have to confess. I sooooo love cottonwood trees. Yeah, the "cotton" can be a little annoying because it sticks to everything (and as my friend PM pointed out, it as a special affinity for air conditioning units), but they only shed cotton for about a week. But it is the special kind of rustling that their leaves make that fuels my addiction--this loud, yet understated rustle that they make so unlike any other kind of tree.

My gauge for when spring really IS here is to hear the cottonwood outside my house begin to rustle. The onset of "cold dark winter" for me is the night I can no longer hear my cottonwood tree outside, and the silence of that night is always deafening, year after year. The first noise of its rustle rekindles life in me; its first absence in late October/early November carries the silence of death.

But all summer, that noise is the "white noise" of my yard. I love to sit outside at night and hide within its static. When the hot summer night air is muggy and heavy, the rustle is barely perceptible. But just let the least amount of wind pick up and the sound of cottonwoods explodes into the night.

Maybe that is what the voice of God sounds like. There but "not there". Never the same volume. Sometimes as silent as the tomb, and so glaring in its absence, yet so seemingly "there yet imperceptible" at other times. Most of all, nestled in the dark winter of silence, that sense that the noise WILL return and my hope to hear it in a few short months is like the Resurrection to me. Maybe, just maybe, it IS the voice of the Resurrection we all strain to hear.