Returns

Spun sugar wind whirls beyond my windows, the air out there peppered by a whiteness that begs describing.  Constant sheets of white blow in this blizzard they've said is upon us, above my fence the sky and the falling flakes are interchangeable, a mutable flurry of furious wind and weather.  But, here on this side of the cedar slats, spinning slow motion down onto my patio table, I can see them one by one, snowflakes that separate from the pack, a dancing dervish of downward motion.

I suffer the curse of the forest for the trees often, but my problem is the reverse: so caught up in the dense vegetation of all that confronts me, I miss the single sweet moments which comprise that density.  I wander in the forest seeing only green, only a canopied sky made invisible by overlapping branches, obscuring any view of the world beyond their reach.

Today, this whiteness wants to teach me something, and I am trying to be quiet enough to hear the lesson in the lighting.  I know what it is to be lost in the thick, to feel a forever pressure to be more, to be better, to be, simply, enough.  I know how to plaster on a smile and sing through the sadness, I know which face to carry so that everyone else sees the me they think they know.  But all that plaster and song, carrying and falsehood, only leads to an exhaustion that breeds a destructive disconnection from self.  So, on this hazy gray day that blurs the branches of the tree line, I am trying to step back.  Trying to let myself see what one reaching tree can be on its own, apart from the copse, singular and lovely as the one small flake I watch whisper its way to ground, seeking soft landing, knowing its cold journey lasts only until the sun--inevitably--returns.