The Light In Winter

Well, here we are again. It started snowing late yesterday afternoon and this morning I woke to a fresh carpet of a few inches on the ground, just when the last of the big 40.5 inches had almost disappeared. The sky is socked in with a white blanket of clouds and the hills in the back are snow-covered with dots of green from the pines trees. All of the trees look as if they were decorated with tiny fluffs of cotton. Between the snow and the winter light, the entire landscape looks like a blank canvas.

In the winter, the Northern Hemisphere points away from the sun, resulting in fewer hours of sunshine and shorter days. Shadows are far more "shadowy" during the winter months. Some days they almost look theatrical. Other days, like today, there is such a contrast between the whiteness of the landscape and the few dots of dark from the bare trees and a few houses that the whole idea of a blank canvas becomes more intense. I like to think of it as Mother Nature washing everything clean and using the winter months to think of what she wants to do in the spring, what colors and forms she wants to decorate the earth with this year. For me it is a reminder that as a blank canvas is to a painter, so is a blank page to a writer, and a clean slate to anyone who wants to wash away the old experiences and ideas that no longer work and start fresh. While I am not a person who ever believed in New Year's Resolutions, I am a gardener at heart and the idea of creating something new, or something better, from a section of freshly turned soil is right up there with Mother Nature's clean canvas. It's the chance to paint our inner landscapes with color, and joy, and peace. Now that's what I call a work of art.

And so it is.