Saturday, January 2, 2010

These Winter Nights

Lately I've found myself staying up into the early hours of the morning. I find it to be a time of great peace and quiet. I am the only one awake in my house. Just me and the stillness. The atmosphere of snowy winter nights only helps to amplify that feeling of reflective silence that I've seemed to crave more and more in recent months. There is something poetic about knowing that snow is falling silently just outside my window. A string of winter storms has brought no shortness in the availability of snowfall. Cold tempuratures and constant dustings have kept each tree branch highlighted in a soft layer of snow. Each bare sprig stretches and twines in the sunlight and the moonlight with equal beauty. When I stand just beyond the open door, under the eave of the roof - I can hear the hush of a million tiny flakes fluttering from the sky. I like to stand there for a while, before I get too cold, wrapped in a blanket, staring out into the white dark night. The winter sky is almost always clear in its coolness. The icy air around me makes me feel like I can almost tell what it feels like for the stars high above in the frigidness of space. They seem as though they are little diamonds tossed across a great black scarf.

I view the snow like a great white tapestry. A great thick blanket that subdues all sound. Even in the daytime din of the nearby highway, there is an underlying stillness that permeates from the background. It is for all these reasons that I so love winter. I can hear the silence that the snow brings. I can feel the snap that the air brings. I can sense the sparseness of vegitation that won't return until the spring. However I think that it is the knowledge that the spring will return which makes winter so beautiful. Because there is always the assurance that for all its cold, stark and terrible splendor, it will always fade away with the same certainty in that it will return again. Unlike the years of our lives which come and then depart, never to return - I can relish in the comfort of starlight and falling snowflakes over and over again, until my days are spent.

It is good to know that some things are certain.

1 comment:

  1. I love winter! I always try to make the best of it while it is here, but I also get anxious for the approach of spring and new life.

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