This morning, I opened the front door to another fresh, breathtaking blanket of snow. Figures, the last holdout of ice from previous storms had just melted and all was clean and visible once again.
Sitting in the utter, enveloping whiteness of snow-covered everything is like being in your own personal limitless isolation tank. Thoughts come and go, some settling like the snow into the furrows of a glove. Only this is important, not your worries, not what lies ahead. For what is ahead or behind in this colorless, dimensionless universe, at the interface of billions of years of earth and the atmosphere rushing into your face? To know this beauty, to be a part of something so big and small that it makes scale immaterial.
And then to rise and acknowledge that which lies beyond this moment. The walk. Through the snow and through life, with a resolution to keep this feeling in the back of your head. Good luck with that. Brimful and I are in the same orbit today, at least when it comes to snow and metaphorical snow, although we ramped into it from different perspectives. I will let her finish.
You could meditate on such things when enveloped in a cloud of snow, in the blanket of white that makes everything look clean, pristine, untouched once again. It’s a blank slate, a slate wiped clean. You can take it as a sign and forge a path.
Or you can just take a deep breath of the fresh mountain air and behold the beauty of the temporary. Because you have been here before. You know it won’t last. Remember that this slate is really just covered, not clean. You know what lies beneath. But that doesn’t make you jaded. It makes you more aware of how precious, how amazing. So look at the impossibly blue sky and feel the biting wind from the lake, and let your eyes burn from the blinding reflection of the white.
It’s hard work, walking through a snow drift. And once you’re in deep, once you are in the heart of the forest, it’s like so many other difficult journeys- you must finish, simply because you have no other recourse, no other options that require less of you. It’s exhausting and after a while, you feel as though you simply can’t continue. But you stop, and take it all in, embrace the moment, and then you start again. And you keep going until you reach the end. And when you reach the end, it feels such a relief, it feels as though you will never feel so happy to be on pavement.
But the next day, you do it all again.
Dammit! You brought the cold down here with your for KdV!