The Inevitability of Winter

As the end of November approaches, bare tree branches reach for the sky. Gardens have been put to bed for the year. The world is becoming less colorful. Creatures, large and small are preparing for the long winter months or migrating south. The weather begins to turn colder and

arriving soon is undeniable. Darkness comes early now. We are just a month away from the shortest day of the year. When I look for something to be grateful for as we approach this, my least favorite season, I am grateful that it’s easier to be up for sunrise and also easy to go out for sunset photo shoots and still be home in time for supper with the shorter length of daylight.

I look for beauty in this pared down season and find a kind of stark beauty in frosty mornings and a soft beauty on foggy or snowy mornings. I cannot stop looking at the bare tree branches reaching for the sky. Winter’s color palette is a kind of gray/white expanse with a few splotches of color here and there. The birds captivate me as they flock to my bird feeders. And the early morning frost on grass and fallen leaves glisten with beauty.

And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

It is snowing this morning, though not the kind of snow that will need shoveling. Instead, the grass peeks greenly through a lace of white. This too has it’s own delicate beauty.

I remind myself that it is the four seasons here in Minnesota that makes this place what it is. Sometimes the remembrance of spring and summer days is enough to make it bearable. Other days I chafe at winter’s cold and snow. Still, I would rather be here than anywhere else that I know of. It is home for me. The trees and woods call to me. And the quiet wonder that fills me every time I enter the woods feeds my soul.

For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pale slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate this rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.
― Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

May you walk in beauty.

Note: Photos of what I saw through my windows this morning.