January 30, 2023
Greetings from the acolyte,
It has taken a few years for me to realize the change in me, because I am stubborn, and sometimes lack the sense to see what is all around me.
A few weeks ago I was driving through the mountains in the west. I was relieved that we had threaded between two major snowstorms, but the mountains around us the peaks stood proud with their new coat of white. As we entered the Uintas in Utah, the snow was just deep enough to etch texture in the reddish-brown rock, enough contrast to show off the trees scattered on the rock, give shape to the ridges and outcroppings.
This, made from thin air and some drops of water. Snow made it possible.
Winter has been an enemy of mine, an interruption. It slows me down, makes me uncomfortable, covers the colors I want to see. It’s cold and wet and unwelcome, I have always seen it as the absence of summer, a time to be endured until I can be warm and free again. I looked back over the years of writing this message to myself and realize how comical it is.
The sun begins its time with us later in the day and leaves earlier. I noticed that the dim morning light, and the last of the sun’s presence in the evening, is made brighter because of the whiteness of the snow. Snow makes light more possible.
Where I live, we pay attention to how many inches of snow will fall, what that will mean to schools and shoveling and what we wear. When you stand in the snow you can feel the cold radiating from it. Cold has always been the absence of living, of growth. Somewhere there is a poem that describes winter fields as ‘summer’s empty rooms’. That is how I saw this season.
I thought of myself as beyond the years of play in the winter, not sledding or skating, not rocketing down hills of snow on devices designed to make the slippery slipperier. It is a prejudice built from years of practice, a seasonal racism of sorts.
What I wasn’t realizing was that over these past years I have been reframing this attitude. I thought I was still a winter grump, when I had already become something new. As I write this, the light is coming, it's being helped by the snow. I love watching nature become something new.
A few times in the last week I’ve gone out to run in the new snow, and it slowed me down, made me careful, at times made me stop. I have friends that would do that for me and I have seen things I would have missed.
Snow layered on the branches of the trees, offering these sleeping beauties a chance to fill their arms while the leaves are still only a dream. Snow marking the tips of small rocks in the water, white mushroom caps surrounded by the dark current. Ice, the snow’s cousin, leaches out from the shore of the river like a marble sculpture, slowly becoming a new work of art.
If not for the snow I would never have known that the rabbit passed here on the path in front of me, or this deer that paused and turned in the woods. The snow reveals, and it disguises, making new shapes, sensual, graceful, where there was only ordinary or unremarkable.
I ran in new snow, in that unique quiet that is visible. I was a pioneer in the day, turned to look behind me for that proof. The world was new and I was its only witness. I watched the pine trees exhale a cloud of frozen white, the powder lingering over us, a murmuration of snowflakes, a celebration just for that moment.
Snow tells a story even as it ages, pocked with the traffic of small animals, littered with branches or pine cones, or the places where snow rolled in itself to write a signature. It is a record of its day, one I have finally cared to read.
The sun edged south in the sky and the cold air that is left mixes with the tears in the sky. From some recipe, some complex math that was created before any thought existed, a new thing crystallizes. It floats into our day, a weightless presence that joins with its companions to create an enormous change. Snow. If you look closely it is beautiful in one way, and if you stand back far enough, it is beautiful in another way. It is only snow, but it is especially snow.
Hope this finds you embracing the frozen truth,
David
Copyright © 2023 David Smith
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