I am a student of winter. This time I am meeting it head on. With attention, dedication, deliberation. I have decided to embrace it, immerse myself in it, consciously engage with it.
Considering I am winter born, it is time.
So, I walk into the dusk, acclimating to lack of light and warmth. Adjust to night vision, discern different tones of dark. Locate Vega and the other stars. Learn to distinguish the specific audio, the acoustics of softer, muffled sounds.
I sit with the ice moon, the wolf moon, who appears sometimes silver, sometimes gold. Noting how, when full, she can light up a night so that she could almost be mistaken for the sun. She can also linger large on the sky, long into the day. Like a memory, an echo of something, a footprint. A tattoo.
I am a student of winter. I plunge into chilly waters, daring myself onto ice, actively seeking places where the wind rules. Concentrate on the diversity of crystals, notice icicle shapes, and streams frozen onto rocks.
I listen to the crunch beneath, examine the different qualities of snow. Take in the dominating white, remind myself that it holds the rainbow.
I watch the sky attentively. Take in the full spectre of frosty blues, from powder to azure to lapis lazuli. Framed by faint shades of purple, pink, mauve. I walk into yellow sunrises and red, orange sunsets that scream.
I am a student of winter. In training to harvest the glorious beauty of everything that sparkles when light hits. The vision of branches and ground now sprinkled in glittering dust from above.
All the while, I am thinking of underground things. Trying to master how light harmonizes dark. Searching for metaphors for courage, looking at synonyms for roar. I am seeking that negative space, the blank page, the shapes between words, the things hidden in shade.
For we are all wintering here, no matter the season or angle or age we are in. All in hibernation, sheltering in our hibernacles, all travelers into this wild unknown. Mourning, lamenting, hoping. Praying. Holding on to myths, rituals, cycles, and beats that repeat. Holding out for familiar crutches, habits, old points of reference. Longing for feasts, celebrations, carnivals. Reunions. A new day.
We are, in fact, all students of winter now. Practising patience, presence. Experiencing that a thing can exist at the same time in different forms. Both solid and fluid, both heavy and light.
I am no longer waiting for summer, nor wishing what was to return.
I am a student of winter. I know now that this is no passive state. It has momentum, direction, intent. Force. It is not to get through. It is to move with. For below the frozen surface, something is happening. Underneath the quiet, beyond the pause. A shedding, a transformation, a reckoning. A Change.
Hear how the ice thunder rumbles below. It tells you so.
