Weather Sampler

Fascinating weather on the drive home from Thanksgiving at my daughter's in central NY.  I got a sampler of snow, sunshine, hail, wild wind, majestic clouds in shades from white to black ... and upon my arrival home, a gorgeous moon with a rainbow ring around it. I stopped along the way to take this photo of the ice on my windshield.

Click on image to enlarge.  Photo taken Saturday, 11/24/12.

Thawing Mirror

The pond begins to pull back its curtains of snow and ice, revealing layers of mystery. It holds the sky and still-naked branches in its thawing mirror. With narrow fingers, the upside-down trees reach for last fall's leaves.

This afternoon I walked up to the pond in search of returning wood frogs, but all was silent. Soon, soon.

The photo was taken 3/10/10 at the pond at the top of my hill. Click on image to enlarge.

Never-ending Snow

My yard. Today. The snow just keeps coming, transforming the trees into something magical, dreamlike. The sleepyhead pines and cedars bow their heavy heads. Like a visitation, a hawk swoops overhead to land in a nearby tree, shaking down clots of snow. Then perfectly still, he/she watches me back.

From "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," a short story by Conrad Aiken:

The hiss was now becoming a roar -- the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow -- but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.

Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)

Click on image to enlarge.

Hungry for Color

The snow continues to fall, drifty flakes spiraling down. All sounds are muted into a muffled silence; the pace of the day thickens and stalls. Yes, the view from my window is beautiful, but I'm so hungry for color. Although I'll likely take some wintry photos later when I venture out for a walk, right now I want to see something vivid and alive. Scrolling through last spring and summer's photos on my quest, I came across this glorious, opening rose, captured at the cusp of fullness. Just looking again into its face thaws the spirit.

John Keats wrote these stunning lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes":

Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.

-- John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Those three words instill spangled commotion in your mind, don't they? "Made purple riot"! And inside the "pained heart." Perfect. Wandering through Keats' writing, I came across these additional powerful and unsettling lines from "The Living Hand," a fragment. I wasn't expecting this haunted feeling, this visitation, to overcome me. See what happens to you after reading these eight lines:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd -- see here it is --
I hold it towards you.

-- John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Shiver. This makes you want to leap fully into your skin, fill your lungs, and take off running to live your life in the deepest way you can. Do you remember what you needed -- with your whole heart -- to do?

The photograph was taken at White Flower Farms in Litchfield, Connecticut on 6/7/09. Click on the image to enlarge.

Shoveling by Moonlight

At sunset, my neighbors' holiday lights cast an eerie glow from beneath the new snow. Like four miniature suns, they formed part of an alien wintry landscape. After my walk, I finished shoveling by moonlight.

Cable Knit Snow

At the top of my hill, I came across this cable knit snow in the road, formed of tire tracks. Sometimes individual patterns coincidentally come together to form something more beautiful and whole. The obvious parallel: poetry. The gorgeous surprise of lines and words entwined to make a poem.

In Around Us the Darkness is Deep, in the poem entitled "How These Words Happened," William Stafford writes this first stanza:

In winter, in the dark hours, when others
were asleep, I found these words and put them
together by their appetites and respect for
each other. In stillness, they jostled. They traded
meanings while pretending to have only one.
__________

"In stillness, they jostled." I like that. Knit together, the lines grow richer and wider, the poem invites us into its deeper pattern.