A Whole New World

In the north, when winter comes the world is made new in a way that the other seasons must envy.  The summer here seems ancient, or all together devoid of time, with the earth's bones all exposed - poking out of mountain tops, turning to dust underfoot.  A land where time has slowed and the lazy sun can't even be bothered with a nightly trip to the netherworld, summer unwinds itself like a rusty music box.  The spring's arrival is a carnival of green.  A social event where the hibernators come out of their holes and seek mates, food, and summer employment.  The spring in the north is a loud and festive event.  The autumn is the summer's super-nova.  A brief and brilliant time of colourful, intense and all-encompassing light before the darkness settles in, and the summer fades to memory.  This period of time between the colours and the first snow is stark indeed, and sets the stage for something more, something huge and entirely novel.  When it arrives, winter seems to me to be a season of genesis.

Nothing speaks of potential like a blank canvas, and when the first snow gently covers the world in white, a new spirit of creation is born into it.  All traces of yesterday's mistakes vanish.  The very thought of having lost anything is forgotten.  The land is asleep, but it is a rich sleep of vivid dreams.  Every step on every trail is one's own discovery of a new way to a new and mysterious place.  The quiet of the long night is full of whispers.  Trees tell their secrets to each other in tongues of ice.  Paws and boots chant their way through the unknown, gently.  The moon rules this kingdom with her silver omnipresence.  This is the fertile void, the flooded plain, the blank canvass of imagination where ideas swirl and drift, never settling long enough to take real shape.  The air too is as new as it will be all year.  All scents that floated through the summer and into the fall are captured, each into it's own snowflake, and locked up until the world awakes.  Only the cold remains, reducing all smells to one common purity.

I was born in the north in the winter, and I feel deeply connected to it.  I was new in the snow, and feel as though I am again tonight.  This newness that I now revel in is not only a product of three days of the blessed white genesis falling, but a response to the newness in my life.  I have become a father and behind me sleeps a beautiful mother and her dream of the future - our daughter.  A new beginning, as fresh as the snow falling outside, and as pure, and as full of mystery and potential.