A feast beneath the snow...

Spring is starting to break out and as my car carried me over the miles in western Wisconsin I saw the signs of its coming feast.

Throughout the winter as the deer and the animals cross the roads they can fall prey to passing cars and trucks. Thrown violently into pieces they die and freeze and often get covered with snow. In the woods beyond others follow their natural course and pass away. The God who sees sparrows falling remembers but we care little and soon forget; until spring. As the snow retreats all the places where these animals were entombed are revealed again, deer with lifeless eyes peering from shrinking snowbanks, raccoons resting places uncovered by the growing sun.

And it is at this point, when winter has come to the end of its course and those animals who have endured are gaunt with it's scarcity that the feast is revealed. In the course of things fresh meals emerge with the lengthening daylight and between the harshness of winter and the renewal of spring there is enough to make the final push through to the thaw. Coyotes and crows, eagles and weasels and anything from bear to bug are fed by an invisible hand as death gives life in its timeless way.

Such is the way of things along the bluffs and in a hundred hidden coulees where the roads and the land and the river intersect. Such is the way of things, death giving life, in a more profound and heavenly understanding, as Lent blankets the world.