First Snow

Our mentioning of the weather--our perfunctory observations on what kind of day it is, are perhaps not idle. Perhaps we have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, to know how the sky is grey, paler in the south, with patches of blue in the southwest, with snow on the ground, the thermometer at 18, and cold wind making your ears ache. I have a real need to know these things because I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place, and a day in which I have not shared truly in all this is no day at all. It is certainly part of my life of prayer. 
--Thomas Merton, from When the Trees Say Nothing, ed. Kathleen Deignan (from journals)



The first snow sits lightly today on a variety of surfaces. A white day on the ground, a sky that looks almost white, though it's grey, too. Where is the boundary between light grey and white?

What divides the water that flows in streams from water that's momentarily captured in the crystalline flakes of snow? The still snow on the banks, after all, will soon be liquid, visibly flowing down the stream.

Snow rests in neatly rounded heaps on the small leaves of an azalea bush. It's the form offered for this day.

But the weather here will be warmer tomorrow, and the sun will shine almost all day. Snow is noticeably transient in these latitudes. So the neatly shaped mini-mounds of snow on the leaves of the bush will melt away with the snow on the banks of streams, and the streams will carry the meltwater away.

The ephemeral snow draws my attention more than it would if it stayed longer. Its novelty captures the attention. Yet I know too, that to see it, and see it well enough to know it, demands that I stop and watch for what it has to show that I haven't seen before, some nuance about the way something about a known place has shifted.

The oft-repeated observation that no two snowflakes are alike interests us because snow is always seen as a kind of collective. Even when it's coming down it's a snowfall. Snow holds together as long as conditions permit, a kind of inertia. When the temperature changes, the wind blows, or creatures walk through it, the flakes are dispersed, or they change form, or they're compacted. Newly fallen in freezing weather, they stay where they are, whether mostly horizontal, as on the ground, or vertical, as on the tree-trunks.

The snow-look of trees pleases the eye. Early on, a snowfall lies on almost all surfaces, whether horizontal or vertical. So we sometimes say snow sticks when it accumulates, and when it simply falls in small amounts and melts away, it doesn't stick.

Snow gets our attention, especially where it doesn't fall very often. So I go out and look at it, sometimes with a camera. As Merton says, "I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place . . ." The events of the atmosphere are another aid to knowing and appreciating the place I'm part of. What the atmosphere does shows up on the ground.

Late Autumn Reflections

In autumn countless branches and leaves
retreat into the sea of Death--
in the garden the crow clothed in black like a mourner
laments over the withered green.
Then again from the Lord of the land
comes the command to Non-existence . . .

Brother, sister, collect your wits and consider:
moment by moment, continually,
there is autumn and spring within you.
Behold the garden of the heart,
green and moist and fresh . . .
--Rumi (tr. Kabir and Camille Helminski)


The trees around me are mostly dormant now, taking a break from making all that food for themselves with the help of the sun. I feel dormant today, too, as I do in times when my natural inclinations follow the flow of the natural world and tell me to be still, sit quietly with myself, or just watch.

I was outside watching when I noticed, in deeper pools of a shallow creek, reflections of the bare tree limbs above. In these images the oak leaves that have fallen lie in random patterns around and just below the surface of the water. The leaves, not long ago, flourished on the trees above. Now the brown, fallen foliage will begin to decompose and build soil that will continue to nurture the trees that bore them, and later on, new trees.

The images change as I move from one place to another, and the light changes, and what I see changes.

Large changes have passed through the ground of my own life this year. I retired in the spring. Then, one daughter passed through a divorce. Another daughter gave birth to a new granddaughter.  After years of suffering the effects of a terrible stroke 11 years earlier, my mother died. Life is always moving, elements falling away, impulses rebuilding. Moments may look stable to us, but give them time, and the illusion of constancy dissolves.

In the photos, the trees are reflections, and the leaves are solid objects, though they're both part of the same pattern. And the leaves can look more or less substantial--the ones underneath the surface of the water are  ghostly, the ones above, sometimes softly focused.

A close look at the image just above shows a bit of gravel across the top, rocks of the earth agitated for ages over the creek bed, first cracked apart, then smoothed by long years of being tossed in the motion in the water. Processes appear in layers, and within the layers themselves.

Movement goes on, even at winter's door. Under the water, in the air, in the way everything looks and feels. Spring will be back. Now the earth says, notice the silence, and the stillness. Slow your own rhythm, let the stillness in.