Nature Journal

Snow...

I miss hearing the birds chirp...everything goes dead in the winter; it is a cryptic silence one that reminds me of the kind of world that we would be living in without the presence of nature: depressing and dull. There is quiet retreat that I slip in when the winter hits in Chicago. This retreat allows me to appreciate nature all the more when it arrives again in the following spring.

I know that there are long months ahead...negative temperatures, chilling wind advisories, and multiple inches of snow. Nature is not kind to the human during these months (just as it is not kind to the mammal animals, either). We are to resist the forms of nature, doing everything we can to protect ourselves from it. And thus, we respond to nature in the most unnatural way: we wear coats,gloves and hats, turn up the heat, and put on fire places.

But there is something beautiful in the way the snow sits when it has just left the sky and stuck to the ground. The snow is clean and pure, and its creation is pure and natural (water and the cold temperatures). I enjoy being engulfed in nature in this way: being stuck at home and enclosed.

Further it covers all the dead of winter as if to remind me that while the nature underneath is at rest, nature is beautiful in all of its forms, even if this form is cold, icy, snow.

Soon the birds will come back, chirping and restore nature again. Until then, I will sit and enjoy the everything that nature has to offer me yet wait wishfully for the warmer months.

a poor picture of the snow sent my mom