Winter Wonderland

I visited winter this week for a ski trip in Tahoe and had a romance with the landscape. So much stillness and poise demonstrated by the simplicity of frost on trees. The animal of me wanted to touch and hold all of it, to run through wildly in a demonstration of my own passion. My fingers dissolved the perfect crystals I saw on pine needles. My steps sunk many feet into soft snow. So I listened to the trees and they told me "Tread lightly. Lay still. Experience cold." I let myself lay feather light, upward gazing, teary eyed, so silent. I let my fingers turn painful and my legs wet as my heat merged with the frost. Mesmerized by the blinding white sea atop the dark and dense mountain earth, I felt the medicine of this cold and this quiet, the transmutation of heaviness and complexity to something light, clear, simple, holy.
I'm back home to Marin flowers blooming in January, but a piece of me is still dancing in white swirls of snow. Thank you, winter.