Montaigne Essay

I fear I have lost the essence of the one place I ever felt rooted to. I fear that I cannot describe it as it is, but only as my forgetful and mistaken perception believes it to be.

It’s funny that I found it easier to take root in permafrost than in the soil of warmer climates. Funny that memories of knife-sharp cold and months-long darkness conjure up feelings of longing. Funny, yet not, because others have experienced the same. I’ve been thinking about Alaska more frequently the past few months. Wondering why I don’t remember it as well as I should. Wishing I could remember it perfectly.

***

Snow blankets the earth in powdery, crystalline flakes. Feathery hoarfrost clings to tree branches, bushes, bracken…twinkling like fallen stars in moonlight. For a world enshrouded by the darkness of winter, strangled by her cold, it is very bright.

***

Sunbeams glint off the diamond studded snow, throwing many concentrated rainbows of white light over everything. There should be a prettier name than “Crust”. Crust makes one think of stale bread, or mud stuck to your boots. March in Fairbanks, Alaska provides the optimal conditions for this snow. It is still bitterly cold, yet the sun has steadily provided more light every day since the shortest day in late December. Despite the negative temperatures, long, continuous exposure to the sun causes fragile flakes to melt down slightly, and then refreeze in the cold temperatures, creating a hardened crust over the top of all the powder.

***

All the words I’ve written in the past fall short. All the words I’ve spoken fall short. And if they’ve fallen short before now, I can only expect them to be less accurate with the more time that passes.

I expected my words to fall short, of course. I would have to be unbelievably arrogant to believe that I could accurately describe any corner of this world God has created without falling flat. I still fell flatter than I expected though.

Our God is a God who delights in variety. We see this in so many ways, both large and small. Why create both paper-bark birch trees and immortal spruce? Why turn maple leaves red and cottonwood leaves yellow? Why make every snowflake unique? Who has the patience for such glorious variety? Our God. Yet, even despite this, our God is not one to be bored by repetition or mundanity.

Not only does He have patience for glorious variety, but he has patience for glorious repetition. Nothing is mundane in the world which our Lord has made.

***

The sky is bigger there. The forest is silent; no screaming cicadas or buzzing insects, other than during mosquito season. The rest of the time it’s quite quiet. The moss and fern-covered earth swallows sound alive.

***

You can hold onto the essence of a moment for a time. A smell can bring you back even after many more moments have come and gone. But the aroma will fade away. Vapor, mist; these cannot be grasped. They will fade.

Maybe the new heavens and new earth will be built out of all those moments. Vapor is breath, and breath is life. Words are life. Man is a lasting vapor. I am a soul intertwined with a flesh made of words. We are mist and we are words. We are meant to last in a world that will not last, and that is where our restlessness arises. The thing for which we long will not be found here. The race we are running has no finish line on this earth.

Each and every soul is immortal, while the flesh, the bodies which God has given us, are finite. And so there is a tension. We often talk about life after death…all the people we will see in eternity. Some are people we’ve known, and some are people from the past whom we’ve never met. Some are related by our own blood. All are related by the blood of Christ.

What if we consider the implications of our immortality in this life? Each person we’ve encountered, each soul we’ve spoken to. There’s a reason we met that specific person, and became a part of their specific story.

70 years, give or take, is what we can expect on average. One inhale. One exhale. One breath. And in that breath we encounter the lives of many, and we encounter those whom we encounter because God has foreordained it to be so. We go the places we go according to His will.

Soli Deo Gloria.