Tracks in the Snow

Everyone knows it's going to hurt, but at least we'll get hurt trying.

I've always loved the snow, the way my perception becomes as though I'm locked in a log cabin, away from the world, snow cementing and nestling me into a safe-haven of contrasting warmth and frost. There is something enlivening to my soul when the earth becomes synonymous with the heavens, when I find myself in the middle of a cylinder of white, from my feet to as far back as I can lean my head. When the horizon vanishes, when it's white into infinity, I find myself at home.

I want to curl up on a windowsill and scribble in petite cursive all the workings of my mind, all the actions of my capacities, with my knees scrunched to my chest and the knowledge that I have nothing to do--no responsibility, no obligation, no plans--aside from absorbing the snow piling up against the window, taking breaths of the winter seeping through the double-pane glass.

It's a Virginia moment, one I haven't had for a long while. It's the desire for solitude, desire for cleanliness, desire for change and difference and peace; a certain sort of peace, an altered sort of peace from that which shrouds me constantly of late. Not the peace that life is working, life is right, and I am where I'm meant to be, the peace that makes words come, the peace that opens all the crevices of my soul up to the winds of words that dwell on snow drifts and swirl past in a haze. The kind of peace that brings longevity to my seldom failing heart and like a bellows feeds and fodders my spirit into a realm of knowledge, understanding, and creativity.

Perhaps the snow didn't bring it on, but is rather accenting the notion I've been skating with all week: that initial peace of correctness and joy. It presses in around me like a signifying beacon that here is where I should be, here is correct, here is beautiful like the snow.

I once imagined walking in a snow-crusted world, my hands in my coat pockets, unfeeling of the cold. My boots leaving soft prints in the unbroken ground as I traveled with head high, truly seeing the world, taking in the contrast of bark against scarves of snow draped round the trees, spying in the distance the faded existence of the forest, snowfall lending a whitewash across my senses, leaving the wilderness a duller version of itself, the colors faded and masked in a sepia grey scale, with an eternal light bouncing off of the winter it was shrouded by.

It's in these daydreams I picture the Indians. I draw back to childhood fascination of the natives to this land, and the early settlers that greeted and uprooted them. I read one book twice, Indian Captive, about a young blonde-haired girl taken captive by the natives and adopted into their culture. I imagine being her, or a beautiful red-skinned Pocahontas, taking to the woods by snowfall, at peace and at one with the land. My hand falls to the trunk of a tree and a remembrance of life rushes through my nerves to my core, and I'm half tempted to sit in the snow bank, to stay here and abide and breath this life and love. To stay until the snow fades away, a thought that never dawns in this daydream or the next, that the snow shall pass. A desire to partake of this world so often stranger to me.

There is love in my person, there is passion and acceptance to the extent that I could fling myself from this window to thwump with a puff of powder into the white beyond. I want to run away, I want to find Virginia, but not for a lack of satisfaction with where I stand, as it has been so often before. I want to take flight for the romance of discovering the white and feeling the possibilities that await awakened by the falling cold. I want to discover all that lies, buried and masked in the demeanor of the season.

I want to thrive within my situation. I want to sing of truth.