Winter's Majesty

There is an awesome majesty in the first heavy snowfall of winter. It is a reminder that the celestial machinery is in good working order and that the cycle of the year will complete itself as it always has done and will again and again.

The first snowfall may be “announced by all the trumpets of the sky” as Emerson observed, but at its best it should come silently, almost tentatively, in the brittle crispness of a windless night. Then in the morning the first snow gleams and dazzles the eye in the slanting morning sunlight; ice-blue shadows chased away by bright radience over the white landscape.

We think of winter as the waning of one year and the promise of the next—no more whir of midsummer insect buzz or the riot of roadside color as the goldenrod and asters rush to bloom. In winter, the streams sound muted, their currents slowed by the frost in the ground and ice fringing silent pools. Woodchucks hibernate; gray squirrels go chatterless about their treetop rounds on gray days. December’s sounds are quiet sounds, the dull pelt of winter rain on the window, the swish of driven snow, the crack of expanding ice on the pond and the groan of ledges riven by the wedge of frost. This is the time of year when the great primal forces of ice and cold drive one indoors to the cheerful warmth of the fire and to quiet reflection. Basking in the glow of a crackling blaze one can grow enthusiastic with Emerson over the “tumultuous privacy of storm” and with him take comfort, even find some security in the knowledge that no troubles last forever, nor does the weather, good or bad. It is fitting and proper that we should welcome the New Year with anticipation made rich and full by all the previous year has given us.

The ultimate substance of faith in the future reaches out beyond the winter of despair to the spring of hope. Something deep within us responds to the change of seasons. Whatever our religion or spiritual belief we are part and partial of these elements of life that endure: sunrises and sunsets, full moons on starry nights, winter storms and spring delights. Migratory birds will come and go as before, flowers will bloom and seeds ripen, leaves will blaze into autumn again. The pageantry of the cycle of the seasons is a show not to be missed.