Snow in Wing

It's been a heavenly day in the village today...white and magical. All quiet - hardly any of the neighbours left for work and the usual thunderous busses were absent at school time. The only sound was excitement from a steady stream of bundled up kids off to sledge and snowball. And I have joyfully passed the day watching all manner of busy birds feeding in the garden and enjoying an upstairs view of bounding dogs rejoicing over the scents in the park.

I finally got out for a walk at about 3ish and although the thaw had begun it was brilliant..still crunching underfoot, a kind of kaleidoscope effect on everything you looked at owing to the sun bouncing off every white surface.

As I walked I was mulling over a passage for a service I'm doing in a few weeks ...the transfiguration...where Jesus meets the prophets on a mountain. And where, so caught up in the spectacle, Peter the disciple asks if he should build three shelters for the holy men.

One commentator I read said we shouldn't get bogged down with this it was just a throw away remark but as I walked past a snowman with this in mind I wondered if we could learn something about man's need for permanence, need to build and mark out a place or moment or happening.

Snowmen, sandcastles, cairns, castles and careers we seem to need to say 'we are here'. I can't decide if we should take a tip from the Buddhists and say stop always thinking about the future, just 'be in the moment'. Afterall Peter is so keen to build, to think about the next stage, keen to be doing the right thing, wanting to take the right place within it all, he almost misses the action and the point. (As indeed we see in gethsemane and after the crucifixion).

If we took a more temporary approach, tried to see things from a view of one just passing through would we be better or worse at looking after our world and all it's inhabitants?

Or is it that we want to celebrate life, to say this is amazing and I am in the middle of it, I experienced this?

Either way it seems our focus isn't really on the snow/sand/God itself, what more would we get if we could leave ourselves out of the equation entirely, what else would we see/hear/feel?

Maybe nothing...maybe something, however transient. Thoughts?

(Found this great photo of a girl playing in snow in Wing! (Actually from 2005 but who's counting). It's by a village resident David Schweinsberg - Flickr is fab. So is his photostream.)