The Snow of December 6, 2010

At 1:05pm on December 6, 2010, the sky is wet and cold. The clouds and trees shiver in the shrill winds, the face-pricking temperature.

The water in the atmosphere crystallizes; and by becoming solid as is falls, it oddly becomes lighter than a liquid rain drop,
and it floats and flutters to the ground, or else hits animal limbs or tree limbs, warm bodies, and melts back into the liquid from which it came.

The noble, delicate crystal structure is swallowed now by its own content in heat.

It trickles down the human cheek like a misplaced tear and is wiped away by a finger without a thought.

Who knows how that happens? Who knows how that happens.

There is a serious sort of magic happening on this minute scale, and it happens drop by drop to flake by flake, a million times over, flooding the atmosphere with fancy and action and all we see are little floppy white specks that gather on the grass.

We can lick it, catch it on our tongues, sled over it, shovel it, roll in it, build with it, spray mud from tires on it to make it brown and gray, urinate all over it with hot yellow liquid, traipse through it, leave tracks, make angels, make forts, make balls, make domes.

We can talk about it, be afraid of it, prepare for it, ignore it, plow through it, complain about it, love it.

We can harden it to an even greater solid by packing it tight, adding water, and polishing it into thick ice blocks that will never float so singularly and peacefully through the air--
because an ice block's mass now could kill a human being,
so that blood would trickle down the check and there'd be no time for seeing red misplaced tears,
only the time to jump and cringe in shock for the morphing ferocity of the natural wonder of pretty, pretty snow.

And only time to take whoever just got hit with the block straight to the emergency room.
 ___________
You see that it's we who apply the meaning.

The snow is uncomfortable and invasive, blinding.

Heavy snow storms and blizzards disorient completely. You are vulnerable outside; you plummet into the terrifying depths of inescapable, whipping limbo.

The snow is beautiful and delicate. Flurries dance a fragile ballet, clever as they fly up then dip down and diagonally, flowing with cosmic currents, settling low in due time.

(I can describe this over and over. I hope it isn't too much. But the images are the beauty, and the beauty is why I write this.)

The snow gathers and is a white template for defiling and polluting with garbage and waste-sludge and anger over the fact that we have to drive and walk through the slickness and cold.

The snow gathers and is a white template for creating art, winged specters, beholding a crisp, clean landscape glittering in shy winter suns--suns who come out just often enough for us to appreciate how breathtaking the blanketing white, silencing slate is.

The green land is killed by careless, jagged edges of small snow-flake soldiers clumping into a cruel, heavy army.

The snow causes us to slip and break our feeble bodies. Ice chunks fall and pierce or crush our faces.

Red on white is an awful sight.

Or the land is cleansed anew in the dead of winter by careful crystallized flakes, preserving the land, covering the limp brown grass blades beneath, the decay of autumn leaves, the infertile, hard ground.

The snow creates magic over huge expanses as the intricate lattices catch and cradle every glimmer of light.

We step out into it and our faces glow rosy red, our hearts ignite, stimulated by the shock of the cold and the love of the beauty of snow so divine.

Red on white is a wondrous sight.

__________
Or the snow is white nothing.
The snow is silence, or white noise.
The snow is numbing emotionally, numbing physically.
The snow is motionlessness.
The snow accepts nothing, reflects everything.
___________
Or the snow is unnoticed,

as spring blossoms, summer blooms, autumn decays, winter dies.

The snows come as they do and you keep at your jobs and trivialities to pass the time, until the snows melt and you pass the time outdoors or in air conditioning rather than inside with the furnace.
Big deal.
___________
Or the snow is noticed,

as multicolored bright flowers burst
and give way to green, thick leaves which play in the warm wind,
soon to turn to blazing red with the onset of age and wisdom that comes when hot, high energies cool and wane,
and brief as ever is this wise relief,
because the reds, oranges, yellows unfailingly fade to brown
as the color and life is drained completely with continued cooling past a point of sustaining comfort,
and we watch the tragic detachment of withered dry leaves,
and often we celebrate their deaths with glee as they tumble to the ground,
or we're not always attentive to them as they die,
and we step on them and break them into the ground where they lay motionless, save for a few twitches here and there caused by the wind...

Then Mighty White-Gray Clouds Convene in the Sky, and They Rise with Ceremonial, Grave Presence.

There is a great stillness.

Then the crystals, the snow begins. The lattices live and grow like backwards beings, as they fall down from the heavens first, then to the earth.

Then the earth is covered in a calm shroud of white.

And the natural matter is saved from its shame in death.

Virility, fertility lost now is wiped away and magic beneath happens.

The pressure beneath builds with more and more snow through winter. The magic keeps things hidden and churning.

And the heat is intensified as spring approaches. The energy again is increased.

The snow crystals melt into themselves, and all is revealed brand new.

Dead matter resurrects and makes the world proud in the new season of life, breathing and vibrant again. The process happens over and over through years.

The snow is noticed for its healing, mysterious role--(apparently) killing to allow for life.
______________
We see this over and over.

The matter swarming is neither deathly nor vital, neither violent nor uniting, neither this nor that, and we feel neither this nor that, and we know neither this nor that.

It happens, and we behold it.

This is what happens beneath the blanket of white everything and white nothing. It is what happens, and it happens elusively, but beautifully and also frighteningly. We are intrigued or we are not.

We are always affected.
___________
(The compulsion now is to make a point. This wasn't a brief clip, not as I intended for it to be brief. I was descriptive. But did you move? Did I?)