That’s what my friend Dave Hayes, the Weather Nut, our local amateur meteorologist (and better than the national pros), calls it. I call him friend because he’s been my online companion through this tough winter (which, according to his stats, is the coldest winter here in 31 years). I read his weather report often and donate to him before end of year.

We’re headed for a mildening, but we did have another ice storm last night, leaving roads, driveway, and paths in front and back topped with hazardous ice. Have to put Yaktrax on my boots once again [sigh!] in order to fill feeders and not crash on the ground. And today I feel repelled by the prospect of wrapping another scarf around my neck, which I do to protect my throat from getting cold.

The gold finches have returned, and they’re goldening along with our mildening, becoming, well, gold finches. I miss the trees very much. We haven’t gone into the woods for a few months because of the high snow. Instead, we walk on lattice-like roads and Aussie gets up on her hind legs to contemplate the inaccessible pastures that, in summertime, conceal rodents and wild turkey nests. There are fewer smells to pursue, fewer animals. She unhappily burrows deep into her warm blanket on the sofa, her usual exuberance diminished.

We’re almost starting our second week of March, and still no sign of tractors bearing empty buckets to be attached to maple trees, which has usually taken place towards the end of February and is a sign of the beginning of the end of winter.

You can say: Eve, we’re at war, and you’re talking about how you miss trees and forests? We’re bombing Iran and allied militias, we’ve hit an Iranian girls’ school and 175 girls were killed, and you’re talking about gold finches and Aussie pining over missed hunting opportunities?

Yeah, that’s our life. The material and the ephemeral, the human and the godly. And I don’t believe you really can have one without the other, but that’s a writer speaking.

Not just this writer. Erin Somers finishes her novel, The Ten Year Affair, with the words: “What was exalted occurred alongside the ordinary every moment, ceaselessly. But you couldn’t make it stay. You couldn’t claim it as your own. “

I’ll go to sit in the zendo tomorrow morning, but not to feel exaltation (though in the past there certainly were times like that). I find it by sitting right here and counting the drops of water falling from the snowy roof, the fence that now leans towards the house and the tracks imprinted in the ice reflecting nighttime activity, the young hawk that finally saw its chance and got a chickadee, eating it on the very stump on which Lori poured birdseed. Food one way, food another. And this minute, one goldening finch.

We’re all creative; that gift was given to us in the first creation. I don’t care if you’re a statistician or snowplower (whose arrival we expect very shortly), whether you spend time selling in Walmart or cleaning the kitchen. Just look at the tower my housemate Lori and I collaborated in below, having fun with a “mundane” task. We have creativity in our bones, and if we don’t manifest it there’s no one to blame but ourselves.

“There can be no reverence for the timeless without tenderness for each moment, “says writer Maria Popova.

Right now, who or what do you feel tenderness for?

It’s hard to feel tenderness for current events and media headlines. I find myself feeling tenderness for those people and things to whom I give my attention. The chickadee devoured by the hawk, but also for the hawk that, being young and inexperienced, made various forays out front and caught nothing for days on end. The apple tree going in all directions, and even before the thought comes up that it’ll need a springtime pruning, I wonder what its branches reach out for, for they don’t all go towards the sun.

None of this comes instead of the fight for justice for immigrants or for the heartfelt prayer for the war to end, or even instead of the short-lived gloating I felt at the firing of Kristi Noem. But you have to make room for “the surface of the earth,” as George Orwell called it even as he participated in the Spanish Civil War. Because it’s in that surface that you’ll find some timeless truth.