Sunday Reflections: BlueGreen Meditations from St. John's, Cold Spring Harbor

The ice is finally gone, and the first full week of open water at St. John's Pond has arrived. But something is already unsettling about it. The male swan is patrolling — and what he's doing is, in its way, both completely natural and hard to watch. This week's Lent 5 reflection: a meditation on love, nature, and casual cruelty — and the question the pond is asking one week before Palm Sunday.

What does fearlessness look like? Not courage in the face of danger — something quieter than that. This week, a swan at St. John's Pond showed us.

This episode has been republished due to a corrupted audio file.

A brief interaction with a grackle.

I've been wearing more sweaters this winter, and not because I'm cold. Then the snow came, and the mud came through it anyway. It turns out Lent and our boots have something in common.

Mid-winter break scatters us across the map, and Lent begins with a story about being sent somewhere you didn't choose. Back at the pond, the cold springs never froze — and the thaw is spreading from them.

Three days before Ash Wednesday, the freeze is breaking and a volunteer is counting muskrats in the mud. What if "remember you are dust" isn't a verdict but a homecoming?

While the rest of us watched the Super Bowl, the owls of Cold Spring Harbor were doing what they've always done — calling to each other through the dark. A bonus reflection on prayer, silence, and the voices that find us in winter.

The forecast promises more snow and bitter cold—the kind that makes you want to stay inside until spring. But St. John's Pond, buried under ice and snow, teaches a different way: not avoiding winter or pretending it's spring, but meeting it honestly while trusting something is working beneath the surface we cannot see.

Learning to embrace the cold, quiet, grace of a snowstorm.

A reflection on the abundance of life we cannot see.