Bernie Michalik's posterous site

There are bad associations with winter. We talk of the dead of winter. Or
the bleak midwinter. Plants and trees are barren. Animals hibernate,
deathlike. Cold itself, winter's prime attribute, we associate with the
dead. As is the additional darkness that winter throws over us.

Yet these should not be the only associations we come to know of winter.
For it is a time of joy and birth and beauty. And though light and heat are
scarce, where they are concentrated, they are a treasure.

If spring is a season of rebirth and hope, summer a time of happiness and
luxury, while autumn is a time of transition and abundance, then winter is
a season of reflection and memory. Winter is a season of the mind. In
winter we can look to the trees bare and the frozen earth and recall and
imagine the fullness of leaves and grasses and flowers that will arrive in
the months to come. Though they are not there yet, we can imagine them
still. And in these acts of imagining, we can imagine further as we pass
through the snow falling the times past and the times still to come. We can
do this in other seasons too, but winter concentrates the mind.
-----------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.