We long for the days of real winter.
None of this is it, never mind the newly colder temperatures now. The sky is bright blue, unmarred by so much as a single cloud; such snow as remains is rapidly turning to slush. The fields are still more white than not, but another day or two of temperatures still too warm for the season and the ground cover will have disappeared, as well.
New year; new world: That’s the cliché — and the hope, but it sound more clichéd than any kind of hopeful now. The speed with which our usual patterns have disintegrated around us leaves little room anymore for that. We have already become so used to seeing the surrounding mountains brown and bare that we have almost forgotten how they should look on this second Monday of the new calendar, never mind the dull and dirty ground at our level, devoid of any real accumulation.
For that, we have only photographs and memory now.
But the photographs are there, and the memories, too, and we know how our small world here should look now. More, it gives us a target for the work of rehabilitation and renewal: If we can restore this land to a real winter world, then we have grounds for believing that we can return the best of planting, growth, and harvest seasons, too.
Today’s photo is one that I find a regular seasonal subject of meditation myself. It’s one Wings captured digitally in mid- to late winter more than a decade ago — if I had to pin down a date, I’d guess early 2011, eleven years ago nearly to the day. He shot this photo on the afternoon at the end of a storm, one of those moments so common to this place where you are granted the privilege of witnessing the front move out in real time.
Now, the fronts are too often just distant enough to avoid delivering any weather.
But on the day this was taken, we had been given the gift of a little new accumulation, a few inches atop existing inches from the last front to have passed through not many days prior. It was also cold, seasonally so, for a high-desert world at nearly eight thousand feet, surrounded by peaks rising another fifty percent higher yet — a time when lows routinely plunged well below zero at night and the highs barely made it into the double digits.
This was such a day, one where even Wings felt the cold sufficiently to keep his gloves on as he took the shot. And that is what you see at the four corners of the image, that bit of hazy deep blue that creates an impression of looking through an old child’s Viewfinder or a kaleidoscope . . . and instead of seeing prismatic mandalas, finding a whole new world in miniature instead.
A real winter world.
It’s what gave this photo one of its names, mostly because he couldn’t decide between them, both being spectacularly apt. A New World, yes, of course, cleansed by the storm and and its delivery of the First Medicine . . . but also what its glove-edged view has always reminded me of: a winter world in miniature, a literal Snow Globe.
Now, to find a way to shake it so that the snow falls once more.
~ Aji
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