Friday Ramble - Embracing Winter Mind

Ice is everywhere on the trailing edges of a calendar year, and eyes and camera linger lovingly on it. We are spending much of our time indoors at the moment, but it is astonishing what can be seen right from a window, any old window, on a chilly winter morning.

Ice glosses trees in the village and sparkles on window panes. Here and there, it forms cornices, dangling artlessly from eaves, roofs and wind bells. Glossy as hard candy, it sheathes roads and cobblestones at first light.  When the winter sun touches it, the strata reveal themselves as lacy blankets draped over streets, sleeping hills and fields, as crystalline fronds of grass and glassy ferns poking out of autumn's detritus. Lovely stuff, in an urban setting or glittering on branches in the snow-drowned countryside.

Whole worlds cavort and hum within icicles, and there is graceful symmetry in their shapes, their transparent suspension. I wake up and get the message once in a while, but not often enough. The few seconds between me "seeing" something and the click of the camera shutter are a particle of kensho, a tiny window in which the mundane world falls away, leaving elegant bones, radiant stillness and breathtaking beauty. It's an interval out of time, no "me", no lens, no frosted leaf or icicle - we are all one entity, breathing in and out together. Such moments are everywhere if we have the eyes to see them and the wits to pay attention. Sometimes, they are lifesavers.

Everything has a story to tell. Tales from the trailing edges, liminal intervals and seasonal turnings of our lives help us to learn and grow, to exercise the wonder and connection that is our birthright. All this simply from contemplating a few icicles dangling outside the kitchen window? I am adrift in winter mind, and it always seems to happen around this time of the year.

Winter's fruitful darkness is a doorway through which we pass to ready ourselves for an exuberant blooming somewhere up the trail. Beyond these dark turnings at the postern of the old calendar year, light, warmth and wonder await us.