January 26, 2014

  A light snow fell during the night, turning the landscape into an enchanted world this morning.  When everything looks clean and fresh I think of the passage:  Your mercies are new every morning.  (Lam. 33:2)  As cold as it is, it is hard to go inside and leave the beauty and wonder of that white world.  Wallace Stevens says it better than I ever could in 'The Snow Man':

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.