Snow

All you hear these days is how much people hate it: the inconvenience, the mess, the roads, the delays. It's all about how it hinders people from the routine of their daily lives or how dangerous the conditions are to get to work, to get to wherever the hell it is you are in such a rush to get to. Or maybe they do love it - because they can strap their skis or snowboards to their roof racks and drive to the trails, jostle with all the other people doing the same thing.

I plan to soon leave the snow behind. I will only miss it on mornings like this. This morning the snow falls softly, just gentle flakes that have rimed every dark branch with white so that the etched line of the branch itself seems like a shadow of itself. I will miss it for the one thing it does that seems to be so underappreciated now. It makes you stop and listen to the sound of a world muted to a primordial state. It makes you stop and look, really look at your world transformed. Snow is the haiku of nature.

All the chaos, rampant life and growth, outrageous flats or towering crags, have all be reduced to lines and shapes in monochrome and tones of grey. When you gaze across the snowy landscape you realize how many shades of white there are. The air you breathe seems clean for the first time since you were born into this dirty world. There is no distance because the world disappears into the white ice rich sky. Edges are soft and indistinct, and you are quite irrelevant.

It is only the fight against the snow that churns it to mud. Take a snow day instead.