Just beneath the eyebrow window in our bedroom, in the early morning light, I spend my day’s first moments gazing at the landscape. It looks so different from above. It is amazing how one flight of stairs changes one’s perspective.
This morning, as I pushed the window curtain aside, I saw a fresh dusting of snow; just enough to make the world appear clean again as only snow can do.
As I pushed a bit of fabric aside, I sensed I was being watched. Far back, near the sacred remains of a fallen tree, I spotted a red shadow on the pure, white snow. How the red fox saw me in the instant it took for me to move a few threads of cloth amazes me. We stared across our private worlds for an moment, then he circled on his path and I on my own.
Later, I awakened again, to this poem posted on “The Writer’s Almanac“. It called to me. Another post sits in abeyance as I want to share this with you today instead. I hope it will speak to you in some way as well.
Snow is falling west of here. The mountains have more than a
foot of it. I see the early morning sky dark as night. I won’t lis-
ten to the weather report. I’ll let the question of snow hang.
Answers only dull the senses. Even answers that are right often
make what they explain uninteresting. In nature the answers
are always changing. Rain to snow, for instance. Nature can
let the mysterious things alone—wet leaves plastered to tree
trunks, the intricate design of fish guts. The way we don’t fall
off the earth at night when we look up at the North Star. The
way we know this may not always be so. The way our dizziness
makes us grab the long grass, hanging by our fingertips on the
edge of infinity.
“Report from the West” by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything.
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