Winter Solstice 2025—Drifting With Snowflakes

            When the air is just cold enough, when the storm gentles into windlessness, and when  snowflakes drift like light lazy earthbound feathers—when all that happens and I happen to be wearing a dark colored coat—well, I become engrossed, even lost, staring down into the perfection of singular snowflake crystals resting for an ephemeral second or two on my arm.
            Within many of those special snowflake seconds that occur between a single crystal flake alighting and its inevitable transformation into a melty droplet of water, I experience an altered reality. I travel with the essence of water into cloud and rise above the wintry world below. Then I drift slowly down to earth, watching the white mountainy world below come nearer and nearer until I float through the trees and alight, unscathed, upon a special sleeve. There I melt into warm wintry sleep.
            Every interlude between snowflake and droplet that I allow myself to dream within yields a woundrously new wilderness vista. Soft snowy hills, steep sharp jagged peaks, tumbling glaciers, vast ice sheets, white cones of dormant volcanos—always a new vista.
            These instantaneous journeys remind me that the concept of time is more complex than we can ever understand while walking this earth and living with the seasons as they change. And they remind me that there is no better time for drifting and dreaming and imagination and creativity than during the depths of winter.