Dark Cloud Country: Chapter 3, Death Oh Harvest

"The thick, ebullient blood welled out like red velvet and covered complete the soil beneath us. A gravity descended like that of a receding ocean wave that pulled us down and tossed us upon the earth

This is Chapter 3, “Death, Oh Harvest” of my newest book, Dark Cloud Country: The Four Relationships of Regeneration. You can buy the book here.

Death, Oh Harvest

Solitude may be measured in degrees, but it is weighed during the month of February in Virginia. Its amaroidal and blue-grey wind bites anything still vertical, and even the Dark-eyed Junco spreads its frost-heaved wings in valediction. It is heading north where the snow is white and the cold its coldest. It is tired of snow that is really just ice and it is tired of cold that is really just cold-hearted.

Solitude is seclusion and silence, but it is far from emptiness. In February, a spirit-filled melancholy settles on the landscape, a near complete heather quilt of ash and clouds and reticence and the momentary flutters of snow, and the rising Juncos from their grounded nests they go, their job here complete.

In December you can watch the snows and their storms gradually work their way across the valley to the south, their advancing white wall a doorway into another world. It is one of those doorways that people like to stand in awkwardly and without much to say, but they stand there anyway and say nothing and try to find a place for their hands to be, their feet stuck in the marais of the white and enveloping marquee.