Twenty-four hours ago, my wife got the phone call no one ever wants to get. One of her oldest and dearest friends, Betsi, aka Boo, had died suddenly. What do you say? How do you console? Her grief was overwhelming.

We’re all just passengers on this journey. Life is so full of twists and turns; one day, it’s sunny and hopeful, and then the next day, along comes one of these terrible Arctic blasts that freezes everything, including our hearts. The world appears to be the same, but it isn’t. Life goes on, but it doesn’t.  It is all such a mystery, and for me, that is when faith needs to kick in.

Faith doesn’t provide any specific answers—it never explains why—but it can comfort. Without some small measure of faith, our lives are lived only in real time, minute-to-minute, day-to-day, year-to year. And when a life is suddenly cut short, time stops forever. “Boo was so happy. We had all these plans. Now…”  Silence. Empty, endless silence.

My mother came from hardy New England stock. She was outgoing and accomplished but like many of her generation and ilk, she was not given to displays of emotion. Once, when I was struggling to climb some personal mountain, she gave me the “you made this bed so lie in it” talk; she was right, but what I really needed was a a gentle pep talk and a strong hug. But that’s not the point. This is: mother lived to be 95 and was in good health and of sound mind right up until the time doctors found a cancer near her spine. She was in the hospital for only a week, then came home to hospice care. Near the end, she was in that twilight stage for several hours when suddenly her eyes flew open and she raised herself from her pillows and said, “I’ve never seen such love before.” It was clear to me that at that moment, she was already in the company of saints, and that her taciturn New England nature had turned into something akin to rapture. Maybe that was the moment my own faith really kicked in.

I am no longer a church-goer. I was once, but I’ve retreated from that obligation. That said, I do have a strong faith. and while I’m not inclined to believe that God has a master plan for each of us, I do take comfort in the belief that even when bad things happen to good people, there is more, something beyond death. I have no idea what that is, but I do believe there is an afterlife, and that all the love we have accumulated along the way returns to us at the end.

Today, Betsi—my wife calls her “my shining star, my angel friend”—at the very least lives on in our minds and in our hearts, but I think there is more. I think I can see her walking on the beach with her beloved old vizsla Auggie: he is once again young and spry and he bounds happily ahead, while Betsi’s footprints stretch away into the distance, indelible marks along the tideline of my own infinite consciousness.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His most recent novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon and in local bookstores.

For more than twenty years, I worked in an all-boys high school as a college counselor, teacher (Middle Eastern Studies) and coach (baseball). I’m still engaged in education as a resource to students who are sorting their way through the college admissions process, primarily as a reader and editor of their college essays. One thing I’ve learned: one of a teacher’s greatest joys comes when the student becomes the teacher and the teacher becomes the student. It happened (again) just yesterday morning…

I was reading a series of short answers—responses could not be longer than thirteen words!—to questions posed by the admissions office of a well-regarded university in upstate New York. The prompt in question was “I am fascinated by:”. My student’s response was “the world, different cultures, peoples, ideas, nature, literature, and eudaemonia.” I was stumped; what in the world was ‘eudaemonia?’

Thank you,Google. Eudaemonia comes down to us from the Greek. It means ‘good spirited’ or ‘well-being,’ and is often translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing.’ But ‘happiness’ is an emotion whereas ‘eudaemonia’ is more; it is a state of mind, an Aristotelian ideal representing a good life, one lived in accordance with harmony and reason by cultivating virtue. By contrast, its antonym runs the gamut from despair and misery to adversity, suffering, and defeat. I couldn’t help but think of the thousands of people suffering unimaginable loss in Los Angeles.

You may recall that in last week’s Musing, I mentioned that on the day after my wife and I returned from several days atop a mountain in Montana, I experienced a strange sense of health and well-being. I attributed this to all the red blood cells circulating in my system after a week at elevation. Alas, it was but a temporary mood shift, but it lasted just long enough to make me appreciate the difference between life at sea level and life in the wake of the thinner atmosphere of the mountains. It was more than a mood; it was a moment (I now know) of eudaemonia.

We are about to embark on a new era, a time that may well test our national soul. Try as I might, I cannot shake the sense of foreboding that hangs over me like thick fog these days. Eudaemonia seems impossibly far away. All the current talk about expanding American power seems the very antithesis of cultivating eudaemonia in our lives. I can feel Aristotle shuddering.

I think a lot about how to get through the dark days ahead, but I honestly haven’t come up with any reasonable answers. Some people say “don’t worry, maybe it won’t be so bad,” but check the facts; experience suggests otherwise. And when I hear all the bombastic posturing about Greenland or the Panama Canal or even Canada, that fleeting experience of eudaemonia I had post-Montana seems all the more dreamlike, more remote, farther and farther away.

Eudaemonia is a difficult concept to define, but there are several common elements in any attempt at translation: growth. authenticity, meaning, bliss, and excellence. I sincerely hope that my young student who will soon be heading off to college in search of “the world, different cultures, peoples, ideas, nature, literature, and eudaemonia” will not be disappointed. We owe his generation more.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His most recent novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available in bookstores and on Amazon.

I’m sitting in front of a cozy fire. Everyone else is out on the mountain, either skiing or snowboarding. It’s cold and the visibility is limited, probably not more than forty or fifty feet.

There is fresh snow on the ground and it’s the weekend, so the lift lines are long and the slopes are crazy-crowded. Did I mention that I’m in the great room of a rustic ski lodge, sitting in front of a crackling fire? Who do you think is happier?

We arrived three days ago—26 of us, spread over three generations. flying here (Whitefish, Montana) from three different airports. I’m the only non-skier, so my luggage was light. There was some concern about this: what would a non-skier do at a ski resort? But I wasn’t the slightest bit worried: I have a good book to read, this postcard to write, and hours of quiet time to chip away at the granite mountain of my next novel. So am I worried? Bored? Did I mention that I’m in a warm lodge with a cup of cocoa in front of a dreamy fire? Hours and hours of peas and carrots and plenty to observe. A writer’s delight!

Skiers are a breed apart. Who else would choose to don layer upon layer of designer  outerwear, buy a lot of expensive safety gear, wear clunky boots that make walking like a zombie difficult if not downright impossible (heel/clunk, toe/clunk), buy lift tickets that cost a king’s ransom, all so they can stand in line for an hour just to make a twenty-minute run back down the mountain with a thousand other skiers and boarders whizzing by at Beltway speed? And then take everything off in order to answer nature’s call? Not me, that’s for sure. I’m just fine in this big leather chair, my stocking feet pointed toward the fire, thinking about what to eat for lunch.

There are a few other people hanging out in front of the fire. They’re talking about sore hip-flexers, strained quads, sore necks, and all manner of other ailments, I’ve yet to see to a sling or a cast, but doubtless that will come. Makes me feel guilty to get up and refresh my cocoa.

Now I have to admit that I, too, am slightly under the winter weather. Airplanes are notorious petri dishes, and yesterday I woke up sneezing and coughing to beat the band. But my wife is a doctor’s daughter who knows everything there is to know about cures and remedies so she sprang into action and now I have a hospital supply room of full of medicines designed to render me hale and healthy overnight. We’ll see about that. In the meantime, I can sit here in front of my foot-warming fire, convincing myself that self care is not the slightest bit selfish.

This is old country. During the ice ages, glaciers pushed tons and tons of alluvial soil down from Canada through passes in the mountains, carving out deep lakes, making fertile valleys. Megafauna and wildlife flourished, bringing hunting-gathering people who lived here peacefully for millennia upon millennia until someone back East decided that what this valley really needed was a rail line snaking its way through the mountain passes, linking Chicago and San Francisco. The rest, as we know, is a sad history.

I throw another log on the fire. It roars back to life, popping, snapping, singing its warming song. Somewhere outside, my wife and her skiing family are doing what skiers love to do. I’m fine right here, thank you very much, comfortable, warm, and counting my blessings.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.

A few days ago, we made it through the inky tunnel of the year’s longest night. Now, for some of us anyway, here comes the year’s holiest night. The common denominator is, of course, darkness and the return of light. Bleak winter’s promise.

I read somewhere that the winter solstice—the astrological moment when we turn our planetary face back toward the sun—is one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations may go back at least 30,000 years, even before humans began farming on a large scale. Many of the world’s most ancient structures—Stonehenge, for example—were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice by using a circular arrangement of standing stones to catch the first rays of midwinter sun.

Some ancient people probably even believed that since daylight had been waning, it might go away forever. They built and lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to return. The tradition of decorating our houses and trees with lights at this time of year are the descendants of those prehistoric bonfires. We are but links in a long human chain.

“In the Bleak Midwinter” was originally a poem penned by the English poet Christina Rossetti in 1872. It has been set to music many times. The most familiar version was published by Gustav Holst; the tune is called ‘Cranham’ and it was written as a congregational hymn in 1906. It was one of my dear father’s most cherished Christmas carols:

In the bleak midwinter

Frosty wind made moan

Earth stood hard as iron

Water like a stone

Today, climate change and global warming may be pushing winter ever farther north, but we still feel its chill in our bones. I suppose it’s even possible that we share some atavistic measure of our ancient human ancestors’ dread about the death of light. But I think it’s safe to say we’ve endured long enough to understand our place in the universe, and to have faith that light and the warmth of the sun will return soon.

Or will it?

Scientists predict that over the course of billions of years, the sun will either run out of hydrogen and swell into a red giant, swallowing its closest planets, or it will lose its outer layers and shrink into a white dwarf, a dead star that will slowly cool and fade away. Either way, Earth will die with it. Another poet, the American icon Robert Frost, contemplated that distant fate in “Fire and Ice.”

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Am I worried about that distant demise? Not really. I figure that by then our planet’s goose will already be either cooked or frozen. Instead, I’ve decided to hold winter to its eternal promise. In the words of the Beatles:

Here comes the sun,

Here comes the sun

And I say, it’s all right.

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.