The start of the last week of the calendar year, and the weather remains a trickster: capricious, stubborn, defiant. It wants to bring us snow, but this artificially-overheating earth prevents it. And so we are treated to a brilliantly sunny morning, light silver and bright against an early blue but with the dark slates shades of a gathering storm hovering off to the west, shifting to skies the color of snow by midday, blues no longer in sight.
This is the path of winter now, uneasy, unsettled, and unsure. Thus far, it has been marked mostly by its absence — or, perhaps more accurately, by the absence of anything resembling the conditions we associate with the season. There is cold, yes, but not enough of it; there is wind aplenty, but mostly of the wrong kind. Of precipitation there has been virtually none, and with its failure to appear, the road we travel through the season is less beautiful, too, the path barren and lacking a crystal geometry that is its customary ornamentation.
Today’s featured image, above, shows the crystal and the geometry together against a backdrop of cobalt blue illuminated by wands of pure light. Wings captured this photo in midwinter nearly three years ago, amid the deep cold and perfect clarity that follows a real snow here. It’s unretouched and unedited in any way, the sky that deep and cloudless indigo that appears to us in days of deeper cold, when the mercury hovers near zero at its highest. It was one of a small casual series he shot in the aftermath of that weather system, snapshots, really, as he went about his days doing outdoor chores — which, at such times, include sweeping the snow from all of the roofs.
This one he captured early in the morning, when even the smallest branches were still coated with ice — microscopic individual flakes aggregated along all sides each twig into a full rime, their crystalline spokes and rays attracting the rays of the rising sun. In the earliest hours of the day is when the sky achieves its deepest hues, to the northwest approaching an idealized, fully actualized “blue.” It’s also the time when the clouds are least likely to show themselves, leaving a vast azure expanse to refract the rise of the light.
This day, of course, there was no such flawless color overhead; sky and season alike remain too confused, or at least two obstructed by circumstance, for either the clarity or the storm. But the path of winter is one we must travel anyway, and like every other, it’s one that moves us along the hoop — the same spiraling concentric kaleidoscopic rings that the snowflake forms, tiny mandalas made of ice.
A crystal geometry has been mostly denied us so far as we measure angles and chart the lines ahead. If today’s suddenly-gray and lowering skies are any indication, that could change soon. But even if it does not, we have those mandalas of memory to guide us in the calculations to come.
The Earth’s year has already ended and been born anew; the calendar year is about to follow suit. It’s time to take the next step into this winter world reborn.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
