from a line by Robert Bly

 

I don’t know why the snowline stops a few feet short of every house. 
No doubt there is a simple explanation. Something to do with the warmth inside 
melting the snow before we notice it. But there is still the surprise that it does. 
As though it obeyed an order given long ago; a little forbearance shown us 
by an otherwise indifferent god, caught on a good day and in a better mood. 

How a man sitting at home alone one evening might take a familiar book 
from the shelf and opening it at an accustomed place, see for the first time 
something he never saw before. And believe he has misread it or projected his own 
interpretation to the printed page, but look again and see he read correctly 
what the writer always meant to say and realize in that instant he was never alone, 
through all of it, and never feel that solitude again. 

Or see his own mortality written on his children’s foreheads and not mind 
the years creeping up on him and accept the minor role from then on 
with gratitude and a certain humility, feeling somehow honored by it. 
How even grief may teach us something, wisdom if it has to, and leave us cleaner 
and the better for it. Able to wonder at incongruities or the merely insignificant. 
To look for the evidence of miracles in the most ordinary events of our lives; something holy 
in snowlines stopping short of every house. Even the empty, the apparently abandoned ones.