These woods are lovely, dark and deep

Yesterday my daughter suggested we make an excursion together to a bookstore so she could buy the sequel to the book she had just finished. She already knew the sequel wasn't available at our local bookstore, so this trip would necessitate, at the very least, a drive over the bridge to the next town, and, more likely, a trip to the Barnes and Noble at the mall in Silverdale -- a good half hour to 40 minutes away.

It had begun snowing -- just flurries, nothing sticking -- so I checked the weather report. It all looked good -- temperatures were expected to hover around 36 -- so we headed out. We got to the Poulsbo bookstore just as it closed (at 4 on Sundays, apparently) so we decided to keep going to Silverdale.

By this time the temperature had dropped to 32 (so much for weather reports), and just as we were climbing onto the highway I noticed the snow was starting to stick and the lawns were turning gray. Oh, well, I thought: it's only 10 minutes away; I can deal.

Though I spent the first half of my life dealing with winter snows in Chicago and New England, it rarely snows in the Pacific Northwest. I've managed to avoid driving in snow for many years now, and though I have front-wheel drive, I'm definitely out of practice. But I could see that the snow on the road was starting to thicken and the cars were beginning to slow down and move into single file. All the signs pointed to what was sure to be a challenging ride back, and I could feel myself grow increasingly tense as I drove.

To release some of the tightness that was beginning to tie me in knots, I decided to try driving from that calm space within me. But what emerged, when I sank into that space, was not calm, but instead an almost blinding awareness of what was making me so tense. I realized that as I was driving I kept imagining either other cars spinning out (and into me) or my own car spinning out and into a ditch.

And from that calm space within, I could see that some part of me had been anxiously looking at those recurring images as harbingers of the future (which was terrifying me) when actually they were flashbacks to the two worst accidents I've been in, both of which occurred in snow -- a sort of Post-Traumatic-Stress syndrome.

We arrived safely at the bookstore, found Ali's book, and headed home, and, indeed the roads had gotten really bad in the interim. But now, having, as Pema Chodron says, leaned into my fears, I could see those images for what they were, and the tension had gone. I found I was able to trust my driving and the driving of those around me, and, though progress was extremely slow, we returned home without incident. Best of all, when I stepped out of the car I felt none of the stiffness that comes when driving with all my muscles clenched.

There is a part of me that loves the peace I find in meditation and longs to stay there, to avoid engaging with the hard stuff of life. But as Robert Frost says in his poem, "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening":

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The fact is that the promise of faith is not that life will be pretty, or easy. The gifts of life are rarely handed to us on a silver platter, and we rarely get to just sit still and appreciate them. It's not that they come with strings, in the now-you-owe-me sense. But they do seem to emerge only in the context of living, of engaging with our challenges; when, in going those unavoidable miles, we stop to look at what we ourselves -- our brains, our assumptions, our egos -- are bringing to a situation, what our unacknowledged issues are contributing to our suffering.

The snow didn't go away. But my reaction to it shifted. And that, as Frost says in another poem, has made all the difference.