Wintering. The cold snap lasted several days, with temperatures twelve to fifteen below zero in our corner of Wyoming, the one opposite Yellowstone National Park. Patches of white splash the hills and valleys, no rhyme or reason to design. Pretty, though. I’m able to write in my hut for the less frigid temperature. It takes too long to heat the space to use it for three hours or so when it’s below zero. I’ve worked bundled up in parka and stocking hat, but no need today.

My editor has completed her edit and I am able (on occasion) to concentrate in our home to correct the manuscript—if not too distracted. For creativity, I need solitude, and it’s best to withdraw to my quiet place. I’m working on both projects today, as it happens, and the small cabin lends peace and grace.

Edits entered, I may now review the pages, an exercise to ensure I catch other errors. It also grants the opportunity to clarify a passage or phrase. Here, the small propane heater’s fan blows in the background and my phone is tuned to an app’s ambient music. A window frames the ravine and ponderosa-covered hill, while inside, a warm glow of amber-pine walls envelope me. I am in my “happy place,” where cares and concerns about the country and world are held at bay by nothing more than intention and attention.

Or their lack.

What is the moral requirement of these times? I contemplate the people who had an inkling that things weren’t how they appeared in Nazi Germany, and I wonder how they managed to continue with their lives. If not obliviously, then care-lessly? Or was it fear? Today we are not blind. We have ears to hear. We have hearts, not of ice, but of flesh. When children are subjected to violence in so-called detention centers and their detained parents are begging that children be freed, how do we turn away? How do we blithely go on with our lives, seeking peace and grace, in tiny cabin or opulent mansion, far removed from the horror? How may I wish for the gift of concentration to work on my novel when men and women are being murdered in the streets? And in whose name?

The banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt wrote, happens when vicious actions are normalized, and complicity—a dark shadow, blocks the sun. Stark winter may provide the means to help us see through the barren and leafless hillsides to what is truly here, now.