Do you ever have a hard time making a commitment...to yourself, to anyone? Knowing what is good is one thing, doing what is good is another. I don't mean acts of charity or other goodiness. I periodically stumble on doing a good thing...say comforting words to a friend who has lost someone, make a particularly good meal for my love, pick up trash on the trail...easy things that take little sacrifice.
But in the lengthening days of late winter, right about now, a winter kind of madness sets in to me and nothing eases it. Everything around me has lost the grace of snowy whiteness, and the grey and brown earthly things revealed I know are poised to burst, yet to me they still feel hard and coiled in their seedy hulls. A moment of sun warms my face, then the relentless grey sky takes over again and I am chilled to the bone, stiff and older than my years. I become stingy with myself, withholding simple pleasures.
Life is out there...I SEE it...glorious and beautiful, clever and cruel. But I am separate from it somehow, as if thick frost covers the glass I am trying to look though. Hans Christian Andersen's story of the Snow Queen was one of my favorites as a child. I read it over and over and at the moment I feel like one of the central characters, Kaj (pronounced "Kay"), after he has fallen victim to the splinters of the troll-mirror.
Quickly I will sum it up, though I imagine you might remember it a bit. An evil troll makes a magic mirror that has the power to distort the appearance of things reflected in it. It fails to reflect all the good and beautiful aspects of people and things while it magnifies all the bad and ugly aspects so that they look even worse than they really are. The troll teaches a "devil school," and he and his pupils delight in taking the mirror throughout the world to distort everyone and everything. They enjoy how the mirror makes the loveliest landscapes look like "boiled spinach." They want to carry the mirror into heaven with the idea of making fools of the angels, but the higher they lift it, the more the mirror shakes with delight. It shakes so much that it slips from their grasp and falls back to earth where it shatters into billions of pieces — some no larger than a grain of sand. These splinters are blown around and get into people's hearts and eyes, making their hearts frozen like blocks of ice and their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, only seeing the bad and ugly in people and things.
It is on a pleasant summer's day that splinters of the troll-mirror get into Kaj's heart and eyes while he and his best friend Gerda are looking at a picture book in their window-box garden. Kaj's personality changes: he becomes cruel and aggressive. He destroys their window-box garden, he makes fun of his grandmother, and he no longer cares about Gerda, since all of them now appear bad and ugly to him. The only beautiful and perfect things to him now are the tiny snowflakes that he sees through a magnifying glass, and his pursuit of them leads him away to the permafrost home of the Snow Queen, who imprisons him. Kaj is presumed dead by his family and neighbors, but Gerda is not convinced and commences searching, and after many trials she releases him from the Snow Queen for eternity.
I suppose the commitment I must make is to release myself from the grasp of my Marchness by spending time making stuff with the East Coast Artist Retreat folks and taking advantage of the snowless land for longer and longer treks with the pup. I can commit to the birdwatching course and finish one thing of the hundred I have in progress. Just one.
Perhaps my Gerda, the heart and soul of Spring, will find me soon. May she have found you already, or, may you be certain she is looking, just in case you too are lost in the Marchness.
