Snow, Our Adversary and Invitation

I find myself loathing snow. I used to love it as a kid like I'm sure most kids do but I passionately detest it now. I used to admire how it calmed the world. It is a blanket to dampen the harsh sounds and resolve the dead colors of modern life in all its hideous hustle and bustle. It was a reflection of my temperament. It was my inner longings thrown upon the world as if my imagination was aligned with the creator. It was both universal and personal when it snowed, a truly magical event.

Now I'm the one who has to hustle and bustle my way through errands full of harsh sounds and dead color. The tedium and boredom and necessity of getting by. And although I once hated doing this more than snow I have come to realize that the world most of us live in does not break for nature's hand. Rain or shine what has to be done, still has to be done. I can't change my seemingly endless need to schedule, work, drive, and purchase so snow has become my worse adversary.

Yet, it still reflects my temperament, as I'm sure it reflects everyone else when we need that calm, that cozy couch and blanket, that cup of coffee, that lazy day. It is both personal and universal. It is a Rothko imposing it's will not on the canvas but miles of the earths topography, allowing endless spaces for quiet meditation and harmony, re-rooting us in our humanity. To be put simply, it is good for the soul. But the world does not break for the soul. These moments can't be quantified. You can't buy anything with them. However meaningful they may be to us in our inner lives, they are meaningless in the construction of our lifestyles, which few of us have adequate control over.

I fear for myself when it snows, an inexperienced Virginian rolling around in my otherwise superb but currently inadequate car, but I fear for my friends, particularly my girlfriend Meghan driving to work in the morning. Lets us move to warmer climates, or never work where poor people are. Where there is no money there is no maintenance, and therefore no safe transportation. For those of you who live in Hartford or any poor place bordering a wealthy place, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Snow emphasizes the difference between the haves and have nots. It illustrates, as bright as day, the lack of accommodation for those who need it most, and the advantages and disadvantages we get away from thinking about when the weather is mild.

I now understand the romantic use of weather in stories to convey the inner state of characters. I once thought it was a contrived literary device but now I see the truth, the meaning of it in bloom. We are an organism always evolving through engagements with the environment. There is a sense of us and the world, me and the snow, but there really is no inside, and no outside. There are no hard edges, only endless relationships growing and changing in accord with one another. Strike another note on that piano, add another brush stroke to that painting, change that line in that poem, walk a little further up the road, throw a dash of spice into that recipe, watch the way the snow rest on your lawn and your neighbors roof. Watch the contents of your experience change. This is not addition. This is not 1 + 2 = 3. Summer is more than the addition of heat, winter is more than its absence because with every variable that comes and goes all else are affected. What has come has changed what was before; endless boundless relationships.

And relationships are so important. My friend and photographer Greg Russel spoke to me about how one doesn't always have to have human company to communicate. You can communicate with the trees, with the sky, with birds. It struck me as being a little too new age and if taken the wrong way I suppose it is. But if you think of communication as an act of relating oneself to something else, an emphasis on that relationship and others which are shared, than communication exists between everything and sometimes the Snow which is external to our will is just the thing we need to talk to.

Snow is like Socrates, a friend coming to irritate us, frustrate us, confuse us, and engage us in a dialogue which brings us to a greater self awareness. It is our adversary and our invitation. It is a mirror in which our longings stare us right in the eye. Maybe, with the aid of each other, we can build a world in which nature's voice is heard because it is also our voice, muzzled by the hustle and bustle of just getting by.