Imbolc Valentine Moon
“When the eyes and ears are open,
even the leaves on the trees teach like
pages from the scriptures.”
Kabir
What then can the winter teach us, when the leaves have fallen and the plants are quiet? Our gardens fall away, buried by white snow, their shapes changed, smoothed, flowing. No evidence of their fertility, or, rather, the only evidence is of its end, brown stems above the snow. A lesson that the same place can be two things. Green and white. Fruitful and barren. Hot and cold.
On very cold days the air has a clarity, a snap to its presence. It insists on your attention and your care.
The cold and the snow preach purity, the willing of one thing. Change by lowering the temperature. Think of the things in the world that could be made better by lowering their temperature. Winter is witness to the power of such change, its possibility and its possibilities.
Blue sky, clear air, snow shaping the earth and wind driven snow. Then, low clouds, gray skies, snow falling fast and faster, the onrush of blizzard. The humbling of the machine. The reconstructive surgeon of the landscape. We do not own this place; we’re visitors. It comes with its own reality, one in which we exist by sufferance.
Winter teaches us humility.