Finding Hope in a Wintry Fog

December 25, 2023  |  Topics: Places, Stories

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By Eddee Daniel

The early morning air is thick with fog. Visibility around twenty feet. The road before me materializes slowly out of the gloom in front of my car. Someone on the radio sings softly, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” The backup singers sound like they’re sobbing…. Maybe it’s just my imagination. I change stations.

There’s something especially dreary about deep fog smothering the snowless city during this darkest time of the year. This year has been especially dark, hasn’t it? And that’s not even counting the hours of daylight near the solstice! I can only listen to so much news—about war, yet another school shooting, destruction brought on by climate change— before I switch back to a music station and one more rendition of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.”

It’s not that I don’t want to know what’s happening in the world, tragic as it seems so often to be. I do. But we all need balance; we need to recharge, to be refreshed. That’s why I’ve come out to Greenfield Park: to seek the solace of nature and to see what will emerge from the fog.

The dreariness dissipates as soon as I reach the park and I realize it was all in my mind. Here the fog assumes an aura of mystery and anticipation. As tragedies go, not having a white Christmas (for how many years in a row now?) is low on the list. Until you remember that it’s part of a much larger, more ominous pattern brought on by the warming trend that also produces wildfires and hurricanes. We must remain hopeful. I set off into the foggy forest.

Here is what I find.

Towards mid-day, a brightening, if not an actual clearing, of the fog. An omen, perhaps. But of what? The inevitable, if far off, arrival of spring; the enlightenment humanity will need to resolve its persistent problems; the resolute entrenchment of ill-conceived and unsustainable attitudes and appetites; the hope that I feel when I am immersed in the wealth of nature available to me in the Milwaukee metropolitan region; the possibilities go on and on.

Mary Pipher, in a recent essay about finding light within the twin darknesses of winter and the weary world, comes to this conclusion:

“No matter how dark the days, we can find light in our own hearts, and we can be one another’s light. We can beam light out to everyone we meet. We can let others know we are present for them, that we will try to understand. We cannot stop all the destruction, but we can light candles for one another.”

For more information about Greenfield Park go to our Find-a-Park page.

Eddee Daniel is a board member of Preserve Our Parks.

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