Making it to Spring
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
2/15/04

 

Meditation for 2/15/04

Spirit of life, mystery beyond understanding,

that which transcends words and human comprehension…

In our still winter-bound world

Where spring may seem a light-year away,

we hold out hope for warmer days.

 

Buried beneath a snow bank,

pushed against the side of the road,

and covered with the exhaust of a thousand

cars and trucks,

is our memory of long summer days

and breezy summer nights.

 

Could it be that long ago

when we could leave the house

without our coats?

Could it be that long ago

When our landscape was in color rather than black and white?

 

How easily we can forget

That the warmth will return,

Just as it always has…

How easily we can forget

That just as the earth turns round the sun,

so turn the particulars of our lives.

 

Forgive our obsession with the bleak,

Remind us that the earth is stirring

Beneath its blanket of white,

And help us to remember that

Our own hearts are stirring, as well,

Even when they feel most buried in winter cold.

 

Amen.

 

Reading   

This morning’s reading is a poem by Mary Oliver entitled “On Winter’s Margin”

 

On winter’s margin, see the small birds now

With half-forged memories come flocking home

To gardens famous for their charity.

The green globe’s broken; vines like tangled veins

Hang at the entrance to the silent wood.

 

With half a loaf, I am the prince of crumbs;

By time snow’s down, the birds amassed will sing

Like children for their sire to walk abroad!

But what I love, is the gray stubborn hawk

Who floats alone beyond the frozen vines;

And what I dream of are the patient deer

Who stand on legs like reeds and drink the wind--

 

They are what saves the world: who choose to grow

Thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.

 

 

 

Sermon

I think I’m an upbeat guy. I roll with the punches best I can.  I try to see the positive side of things.  I’m mostly optimistic. But no matter how upbeat I might like to think I am, I am still susceptible to the winter blahs…the feeling that winter might never go away, the earth might never thaw out, and I might never crack through the ice of my own seasonally frozen spirit.  I suppose not everyone experiences the blahs this time of year, but I’m guessing that many of us here today are feeling the weight of this winter world and wondering when it will all end…when and how we will finally make it to spring.

 

The blahs arrived for me in full force a couple of weeks ago when I was battling a nasty cold.  The snow kept coming, I kept sniffling, and my perspective kept skewing in unhealthy ways.  Not only was the world covered in white, it seemed as though my brain was in the midst of a white-out.  I was irritable and teary and basically feeling overwhelmed.  Around this time, I called one of my mentors, a UU minister with over 25 years of experience.  Before I could admit to him that I felt as though I had nothing to say…that I was incompetent as a minister, that my creative well had frozen and my computer screen had become a menacing wall of white…he said, “So Mark, have you hit the winter blahs yet?” 

“Yes!” I exhaled, grateful to have the benefit of his wisdom and experience.  “I am sooo having the winter blahs.”  Just as I was about to ask him to reach into his memory bank and share with me some ways I could overcome the blahs, he said, “Not much you can do.  They’ll come every year you know…and they don’t get any easier.”

 

You might think that his prediction of a life in ministry filled with winter blahs would have been discouraging to me.  But, I confess, I felt some comfort in the knowledge that the blahs are part of a cyclical pattern over which I have little control…much like the winter season itself, which comes every year around the same time…and ends every year around the same time, according to natural rhythms as old as the planet itself.  Just as winter must run its course, so must the blahs.

 

I did ask him how he keeps writing this time of year when the well is frozen, and he said, “I find good material.”  Which reminded me of something another elder colleague once wrote.  He said he attributed his success in ministry to “borrowed excellence.”

 

Borrowed excellence.  I like that.

So my sermon this morning, which, by the way, is filled with borrowed excellence, is dedicated to all of us who are challenged this season…whether by frigid winter weather or by a winter of the heart brought on by illness or loss or just good old-fashioned grief.  I offer this sermon to you with the belief that the cold winds rattling our bones right now are not permanent…they never are, no matter how much they sting.  They are simply the currents that will eventually carry us to spring and warmer days…if we can hold on.  May we all make it in one piece.

 

So let me tell you about the excellence I’m borrowing.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading the newest book by biologist Bernd Heinrich, a New Englander who has spent a lifetime observing the natural world, paying attention to the behavior of our earthly companions and recording his observations as journal entries that have later become books.  He has written entire volumes on ravens, bumblebees, trees, and owls.  In his latest work, entitled Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival, he examines the ways in which nature sustains itself even in the face of winter’s harsh demands and challenges. I figured that a book focused primarily on the ways in which various animal species survive winter in northern climates might be useful to me as I worked through my own winter doldrums and I have not been disappointed.  I share some of what Heinrich has found because, as he writes, “[studying the natural world] can show us the unimaginable…. The greater our empathy with a variety of animals, the more we can learn….” This opening ourselves to the unimaginable is important work…particularly the extraordinary, miraculous stirrings of the natural world that are, perhaps, the finest and most revealing religious text we could consult. 

 

I have singled out two of the species that Heinrich discusses in his book. I find the stories of their winter survival to be rich with metaphor and wisdom.  I trust you will, too. Plus, just think, when your children ask what you learned in church today, you can say we learned about the birds and the bees!

 

I begin with honeybees.

 

I was surprised to learn that a honeybee colony does not hibernate during the winter.  Odd to imagine that those bees keep right on working all winter long…buzzing in their hives even when there is no pollen to collect…but they do.  In fact, they are the only insects in the Northern Hemisphere who keep themselves active and heated up throughout the winter months.  No matter what the temperature might be outside the hive, the temperature inside remains at all times between 95 and 100 degrees farenheight. 

 

How do the bees do it?  As the temperature outside and then inside the hive decreases, the bees pull closer to one another to form a smaller and tighter cluster. The temperature of the colony is regulated not through communication from the queen or between the bees in the core of the hive and those on the outer edges.  The overall temperature of the hive is stabilized by the individual bees regulating their own temperature.

 

(Isn’t that an interesting idea for a community to consider?  The health of the community is stabilized not by one person or by a cluster of people but by each individual member regulating her own health. But we all know how difficult that is to do, so how do the bees do it?)

 

First the colder bees on the outer edges crawl deeper into the cluster, effectively plugging up the holes, and trapping the heat produced by the bees’ metabolism.  When the cluster is as tightly gathered as possible and there are no more holes to plug, the bees on the outside must shiver to stay warm…to create heat on their own…but only as a last resort, since individual bees shivering on their own is not as efficient or as effective for the health of the colony as clustering…as gathering closer together and conserving energy.  When temperatures outside the hive begin to rise, less heat is released and the bees inside the cluster may begin to heat up and venture out to the outer edges again where it is cooler.  In the process, these bees recreate the channels for air flow that were blocked when more heat needed to be conserved.

 

As the end of winter nears, however, particularly as the sun rides higher in the sky, thereby heating up the hive, the bees begin an important gamble: they fly out on their own…often times before the weather is really warm enough for them to survive.  Heinrich says that he had assumed that the bees are forced by necessity to venture out into the cold…that they must relieve themselves after being confined in the hive for over two months.  Think of it: 40 thousand bees in close quarters all winter with no bathrooms!  But after watching colonies more closely, he determined that the bees left the hive according to another necessity—the genetically programmed need to scout for food and water.

 

Because honeybees need to maintain a body temperature of at least 60 degrees, those who are compelled to leave the hive before winter has completely let go of its grip almost inevitably perish within seconds. Heinrich figures at first that the air is just too cold for the bees to survive.  But after observing many of the bees hitting the snow in “fully powered dives,” and noting that the abdominal temperatures of those bees shortly after their dives had been within their survival range, he determined that the cold was not the primary reason they were dying.

 

So what is it that drives the bees into the snow, when it is probably the last place they want to go?  Heinrich discovers that the bees are driven into the ground by a lack of perspective.  (Ahhh, driven into the ground by a lack of perspective) The blanket of snow that has covered their world in an unfamiliar and featureless white disorients the bees and makes them lose their bearings.  (Sounds a lot like how I would describe the winter blahs!) Heinrich tests out his theory by laying wood shavings all around the hives, effectively covering up the snow, and then, on a particularly cold morning with the temperature not much warmer than today [less than 20 degrees], he provokes the bees to come out by poking a twig into the hive.  While a few bees still crash as before, almost half of the forty that he coaxes out are able to return safely to the hive.  During a thaw later that month, when the temperature is only a few degrees above freezing, Heinrich observes that there are only a few dead bees around the hive.  Beyond his wood shavings, however, he could find at least sixty dead bees.  So while a change of perspective brought about by the wood shavings does help, the bees still cannot overcome the cold paired with their mission to find food that does not yet exist.

You may be wondering why the bees keep going out into the cold when there is little hope that they will find the sustenance they need. However, if you think of the bee colony as a single super-organism, essentially one body with lots of moving parts, the kamikaze flights of a few bees don’t seem so tragic.  In fact, they are not tragic at all…they are merely the failed attempts of the colony to carry on despite the cold.  (Just as all of us must do.) Only through this trial and error, this calculated gamble, will the colony finally be able to partake of the first blooms of the spring…a bounty that it cannot afford to miss…especially if winter decides to make a comeback before finally departing for the year.  Survival for the colony in the summer depends on the bees winter gamble…which reminds me of how our own winter gambles, the risks we take to keep slogging through our own winter challenges, help carry us to brighter days. 

 

Now to the birds…specifically the golden-crowned kinglet…the world’s smallest perching bird…a bird the size of a walnut and weighing about the same as two pennies…a bird that plucked, “looks like a pink cherry on spindly legs,” a bird that thrives in the northern winter woods, where sixteen-hour-long winter nights of subzero temperature are common.  In light of our human fragility in the cold, the survival of the kinglets is “miraculous.” Heinrich writes, “When I see a kinglet hopping through a densely branched spruce tree covered with pillows of snow, I often imagine myself in its place, wondering how it experiences its world…. The world is suddenly that much colder, and a fate of freezing to death in the northern winter becomes an almost nightly possibility.”  Heinrich finds that only in the context of other animals’ adaptations (including our own) can we fully appreciate the wonder of how kinglets can survive sub-zero temperatures…and, in turn, be inspired toward the “wellspring of hope” imbedded in the mystery.  He writes, “If kinglets can do it, then anything seems possible.”

 

In order to survive, kinglets must maintain a body temperature around 105 degrees.  And due to their diminutive size, they cannot carry a great deal of insulation.  So how do they stay warm? They fluff what feathers they do have and they do all they can to stay dry.  While kinglets are not seed-eaters and they cannot reach grubs buried deep in wood like other birds who share their forest, they still require a steady diet to fuel their metabolism enough to keep warm.  If kinglets are without food for as few as one to two hours in the daytime, they will starve and freeze to death.  So, during the day, they are non-stop foragers, moving at an average of 45 hop-flights per minute, switching from tree to tree as necessary, to feed on tiny geometrid caterpillars.  Kinglets are unique among bird species for their ability to go outside their normal bounds in search of food.  Their willingness to move beyond their comfort zone is one way they insure their survival.  They simply do what they have to do and they don’t have time to feel sorry for themselves.  Winter blahs…who has time for winter blahs when you’re a kinglet?

 

Kinglets are known to huddle together in groups of two or three at night, but huddling does not provide enough energy savings to prevent hypothermia.  Adequate shelter is equally essential for the birds and they take it wherever they can find it, perhaps in an abandoned squirrels’ nest, or even more likely in a snow cave on a branch of a tree.

 

After an extensive study of the tiny birds, Heinrich concludes that, unlike humans, who require fire for our survival in the winter, the kinglet has no such magic key for making it to spring…other than luck and a drive to do whatever it can to survive.  Heinrich writes:

 

“Lucky for a kinglet, it does not know the odds stacked against its individual survival.  Presumably it could not contemplate its fate, regret about mistakes, or fret over injustice or lost opportunities.  It does not worry about the future, or about life and death…[for doing so would] only compromise…its survival.  …There is so little, if anything, it could do to change things in its world where the relevant things—ice storms, a subzero night, winds, food scarcity—are ruled by chance.”

 

He goes on:

 “I do not and cannot ever know the combination of happiness, hunger, or emotions that energize a bird.  But whenever I’ve watched kinglets in their nonstop hopping, hovering, and searching, seen their intimate expressions, and heard their constant chatter of…songs and various calls, I’ve felt a hyper enthusiasm flow from them, and sensed a grand, boundless zest for life.  They could not survive without that in their harsh world.  Like us, they are programmed for optimism.”

 

As I try to apply the lesson of the kinglet to my own life, I see the same message my mentor gave to me when he told me I can’t avoid the winter blahs…I can only live through them.  Similarly, I think, the way we can make it to spring from whatever winter we might be facing, is to not be obsessed with the winter world in which we find ourselves—the snow or the cold or the loss or the grief—but to see ourselves existing within and through the winter…to tap into our inherent strength and resilience and give ourselves time to adjust until we get to the thaw always waiting on the other side of winter’s margin.

 

I heard this wisdom described in simple terms the other night.  A friend shared with me the story of someone who had faced one of the most chilling winter periods of her life, and who, when asked how she did it…how she survived…replied, “I was a broken person and I walked around as a broken person until I wasn’t broken anymore.”

 

And somewhere inside her, I would guess, a still small voice kept singing even when she couldn’t hear the song…even when the winter wind threatened to drown it out. 

 

A still, small voice inside of life itself.

A still, small voice not all that unlike the hum of the honeybees or the song of the kinglet.

A still, small voice deep inside of each of us.

A still, small voice that can carry each of us to spring, if we will just listen closely enough…and find the courage to sing along.