It comes that time every year, when the days get shorter and the hours are filled with a cold that seeps into your bones. The trees that were once so vibrant and colorful have shaken the last of the brown, crinkled leaves off of their fingers to expose their skeleton to the world. The world that is pulling its shades down, turning the thermostat up, and pulling its sweaters out of the closet.
As society hunkers down, it is truly nature's time to shine once more. Mother nature defies what most human's have been conditioned to think: That even in the midst of death, beauty can arise.
I happened to notice this beauty in the form of snow today. What I have previously viewed as a nuisance, something that gives us humans more work in the form of shoveling, dressing our tires with chains, and attempting to keep warm, is actually one of the best gifts:
Take yourself out to a field just after a snow storm. Let the sun be at a morning angle, nearly straight above, but not quite, and just let yourself gaze. Look at your feet as they trek a path through the untouched swath of white, look to the trees, capped with little tufts. It seems like such an elementary thing, something that can just be relegated to "precipitation" and the percent chance of it falling.
Or you can revel in the fantastic chance that is the combination of these countless amounts of frozen pieces. These frozen pieces coming together to form the landscape of which you are now observing. And this untouched field has just as many possibilities as the snowflakes did when they fell: you can continue forward, backward, side to side, fall down, crawl, bring someone with you. Bring 100 people with you. Have a snow ball fight. Stay for an hour. Stay for a day.
And while doing all of this, the snow will document it for you. With every step, a shoe appears. With every collapse of exhaustion, the wrinkles of your clothes leave thousands of marks, pressing the snow together to create a mold of your own body. It is your own personal catalogue of movement and choices, laid out for you to see with your own two eyes.
It is Nature's Journal.
