The weekend storm amounted to . . . well, not much that could be called a storm at all, frankly. Some sleet late Saturday night into Sunday, the odd flurry yesterday paired with high cold winds, and then finally a dusting of actual snow last night.
It’s all gone now, melted beneath the dawn light. So, too, is that light at the moment, as the clouds have coalesced once again overhead and around the peaks, all precipitation tantalizingly just out of reach.
The winds, though? They’re already here, in force and fury, and so the cold is far more beauty than the mercury would suggest.
Wings captured the image above not long ago: a sunny afternoon not long before day’s end, right around the midpoint of winter. There was more snow present on the ground then, albeit not nearly as much as what memory drives us think of, still, as our “norm.” There are no more norms, at least none we recognize, and the glacial pace of human acceptance has yet to make any kind of peace with that.
Outside the boundaries of this small square of land, the news is unrelievedly bad, both from far-flung lands and in spaces terribly close to home. Elsewhere, this is a week of early celebration, one last carnival, one last feast and dance, before people fling themselves voluntarily into the stringencies of the Lenten season.
Fasting takes many forms, and Mother Earth has long been on a fast enforced now from without. And still, she brings us water and color and light, harbingers of future abundance . . . hope, at winter’s end.
This shot captures so much of that hope, of the promise contained in the cold season, of the gifts the earth delivers from beneath her snowy blanket, the very earth so much of humankind has so readily abused for so long. It is the pure love of the parent, the kind every human child deserves and so many fail to get, the kind that will labor to ensure its children’s health and well-being even in the face of drastic privation.
It is the kind of love that is the very embodiment of hope, its own manifestation of abundance.
For now, the skies are mostly gray, but the light is there behind the veil. The earth is soft, receptive, welcoming — ready to accept whatever seeds its children shall choose to plant, and to return new life, fully birthed and in kind. And the winds, terrible as these tricksters be, will drive the clouds beyond the peaks before the day is done, leaving space for a warmer tomorrow.
That is the essence of this threshold season, one that is simultaneously winter and spring, both spaces and ways of being examples of privation and abundance at once, seeming opposites that are not: They are cooperative, collaborative, fellow aspects of community. They work together, because they need each other to bring into being once again a world of warmth and color and light.
And so on this week that seeks to trade long-term privation for short-term abstinence, short-term celebration for long-term abundance, even as we rue the winds that howl outside the door, we are grateful for what they make possible: hope, at winter’s end, and the promise of spring fulfilled.
~ Aji
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