Peace is the Only Power

On Waiting in the Cold, the Empty, and the Dark

Jan 09, 2025

Stephanie Smith will be with us for a reading and book talk on January 18th at 7pm at Nooks! You can find out more and get your tickets HERE.

I walk with the kids out to their bus stop and we stand there in the 20 degree weather, our backs to the wind, and we wait. Traffic streams past. The sky is an icy mess of iron gray clouds. It’s not easy waiting in the cold. “Feels like 0 degrees,” my weather app told me before we walked out the door.

My daughter laughs and points at the squirrels—they’re scurrying around under the trees and bushes, gathering large handfuls of leaves in their little paws, and running the leaves up the large oak, placing them into their nests. One squeezes through the tiniest hole at the end of a hollow branch, vanishes, then emerges empty-handed to find more leaves.

A light dusting of snow still covers the grass and the trees and the houses, crystallizes into diamond specks that billow around when the wind kicks up.

The bus arrives and they climb aboard and I take our dog Winnie down behind our house, where Maile joins us. We hike through the woods, noticing all the trees that have come down recently in the wind—in the next few years they will slowly merge with the earth, but for now they wait, frozen in place. At the river we turn right and walk along the narrow path, looking down at the icy water.

And there, the geese, floating placidly on the calm surface, not minding the cold at all, waiting for spring.

I’ve been reading through Stephanie Smith’s relatively new book, Even After Everything. It is a beautifully written book. My January reading is mostly done in the basement, with very little light, in the warmth of the wood stove. I read about Stephanie’s miscarriage and then her subsequent pregnancy that began in the throes of the pandemic. Waiting to hear a heartbeat, instead of a void. Waiting to find out if anyone has tested positive for Covid-19. Waiting to see if this baby will thrive in her womb or if another miscarriage is imminent.

She writes,

It was early summer, the first summer after the pandemic had been declared. Just months before, in March, two biological events in microscopic scale began in parallel, and they would change my life forever in dramatically different ways. Particles. Cells. The smallest measurable matter began gathering force. One would culminate, or so we hoped, in the birth of our child, a person we had not yet met but to whom we would belong forever. The other would result in a pandemic causing six million worldwide deaths and untold tragedies, all brought about by something so small we couldn’t see, forever splicing the lives of survivors into the kind of before-and-after no one ever asked for.
It was astonishing to consider how something so small, smaller than the period oat the end of a sentence, could loom so large in consequence for our lives.

I remember a similar wait, when Maile and I had two children and Maile was pregnant and we were waiting in the examination room for the tech to find our baby’s heartbeat. I remember the look on her face when she said she needed to go get the doctor. I remember when he, a Catholic Italian man with a huge personality, told us not to worry about this miscarriage we had just discovered moments before, that we were sure to have many more children. Then he left the room, and we cried quietly, and we waited to see what would happen next.

Down at the river, Maile, Winnie and I stand beside the pool we almost always visit. We call it the shell beach, because the banks are lined with the tiniest shells. There is a thin skin of ice over the pool, and the passing river laps waves of water up onto that icy shelf. The river is low. Massive logs are jammed up against what used to be the cement pylons of a bridge, perhaps for a train? The scene is desolate.

But I remember the previous summer when we hiked here as a family, and the water was roaring by and we climbed out the logs and sat on them while Sammy took a dare and jumped into the pool, freezing cold even in early summer. We all laughed and cheered and the kids splashed around the rocks and there was so much life.

How can one space in the world hold so much life and so much stillness, the only difference being the season?

Waiting is the only way from here to there.

“Increasingly in our society we feel we have less and less influence on the decisions that affect our own existence. Therefore it becomes increasingly important to recognize that the largest part of our existence involves waiting in the sense of being acted upon. The life of Jesus tells us that not being in control is part of the human condition. His vocation and ours are fulfilled not just in action but also in passion, waiting.” Henri Nouwen

Later in the book, as Stephanie’s labor and delivery approaches, she writes,

“Where I had sought control, I would need to learn to surrender.
Where I had regarded with suspicion, I would need to learn to trust.”

It strikes me that this is always the way of waiting: this surrendering, this trusting.

Are we as humans ever NOT in a liminal season, ever NOT in an in-between time? I suppose there are moments of arrival and departure, but the vast majority of our life is experienced somewhere between here and there.

I recently finished a project and wait for more work to come.

We’ve entered a quiet season at the book shop and wait for things to pick up.

We lost Maile’s dad in August and began the journey into grief, one we will continue on, probably for the rest of our lives in some way or other, and we wait for the pain to lessen.

How, then, shall we live?

I’ll leave you with Stephanie’s words:

“Peace be with you.”
After everything, these are the four words that hold the world. Peace is the only power capable of breaking the brutal hold of fight, flight, freeze. Peace is the bear hug, the belly laugh, the huge, sweeping exhale capable of ushering our bodies from shock into divine shelter.

Stephanie Smith is an author, an acquisitions editor, and will be with us for a reading and book talk on January 18th at 7pm at Nooks! You can find out more and get your tickets HERE. If you’re not in the area or can’t make the event, you can also order a copy of her book, Even After Everything, by emailing us at hello@nooks.gallery or purchasing from Bookshop.org (where our bookstore Nooks will receive a generous portion of your purchase).

Maile and I finally got around to podcasting about our experience buying a book shop, and we named the podcast . . . So, We Bought a Bookshop. Our first episode is live. But not yet available on iTunes podcast registry…Soon.