winter

What a rare joy and beauty it has become to see snow lately! You come to see it on the screen behind the dusty and cold glass of the TV set, you see it and you wonder what was like in the old days, the days your folks told you about. You see it and you still think it’s a setting, something technology can fake so perfectly… you watch it for a while, might even like it but then you get bored and realize your daily things and plans couldn’t or rather wouldn’t go hand in hand with what winter once meant: snow. You might like it in pictures, wallpapers, hell, you might even like it in the mountains, you like to know it’s there for you to go in the weekends to some log cottage with your friends, to ski a little, sledge, have a snow fight just to turn to the warmth and the wine waiting inside. Everything is fine, and yet the bottom line is that by the end of the day / weekend you already forget about the real beauty snow offers… Even worse than that, many of us have been taught to hate winter, snow is accidents, disease, death, snow is me not getting in time to the party, not being able to take my walk… And quite ironically, we indulge in this hyper-need we have for commodity and coziness, that snow has become a top enemy for us, we started to like it on the screen only, as a fairytale setting for Christmas stories, a time when all miracles happen. And yet we fail to see a miracle it’s happening right now outside; it’s snowing. Quite sadly, snow has entered this category of miracles, now… And blind as we are we would rather go for the “beauty” we see on TV, or in magazines, rejecting what God has offered and wished for us in winter: white, purity, silence and peace, and the simple joys people used to share in these moments.

Have you ever tasted winter?
It’s like that freshly lain down snow, the taste of nature, of something so familiar and yet so unique and unbelievably unpaired. Once you tasted it, it remains there for good in your mind, and resurrects every winter, every time it’s snowing, like it’s doing tonight.
The snowflakes have been performing an unseen ballet, as if flowing on Tchaikovsky’s music – they are carried away by their own will to cover everything, mostly the ugly houses and streets- the human creation.
Belles ringing as in a ritual to call for the snow: there shall be snow! And there it was- white, dancing, refreshing and full of life, as one would think was imagined by T. in his dance of the sugar plum fairy. Such a joy to try to grasp it with all senses, to try to glad your eyes with it, to taste it, to listen to it silently covering everything! It’s actually the very few instances when you can listen to the sound of silence. As absurd as this may sound, when snow lays itself on the ground, it does it with so much dignity and so silently and yet be music for the sensitive and open heart.
It’s definitely magic, a magic worth falling in love with!