12/31/2024
As 2024 curls away and 2025 is poised to unfurl, I find this piece, written awhile ago by Parker Palmer, to be a practical metaphor that I want to keep in mind in the midst of the blizzards of stimuli happening more frequently & intensely all around us. It seems to me that there are more “blizzards” now than I recall from past decades, but I also know we have always had blizzards. Threats, devastation, tumult, heartbreak, death, distraction, trivia, invective, rumor, hate, greed, terror, uncertainty, clamor, lies, and so much more.
I’ve lately, coincidentally, been recalling a story from a favorite childhood book about someone tying a rope between the door of the Little House and the door of the barn as a blizzard approached, so it’d be possible to care for the inhabitants of the barn and still make it home safe across the yard for as many trips as were needed for as long as the blizzard lasted. I don’t know why it’s come to mind of late, and when I read this piece, I was a bit startled at the synchronicity. As a child I’d not yet experienced weather so intense you could get lost in it. But the story caught my imagination and stayed with me until I did have experience in such conditions.
The way Palmer writes about coping with the “blizzards” occurring in our world and lives and psyches has given me a way to engage with that story in more depth than I’d thought to before now. I’m visualizing a rope that gives me a fixed point in a turbulent, freezing white-out, fastened between where I go out from and where I must go out to. How do I come to know who and what is so important that I must, moreover I want to, go out in the blizzard to the barn? And where is my home, and what comfort & support is contained within, that calls me to hold fast to my rope in the midst of the cacophony and buffeting and iciness, so I return safely for repose and joy and restoration?
I think maybe I’ve got the beginnings of a schema to help me steer away from the heavy weather I’ve sensed inexorably forming on the path ahead.
The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul. —Leonard Cohen Building on Cohen's refrain, author and educator Parker Palmer reflects on the importance of having a "rope" in the "blizzard" of our personal and professional lives t
