The Quiet Of A Winter Morning

Winter has come...


                                                                                                                                Google Images


Winter is setting in here in my beloved home of Minnesota.
I am a native of this great northern land and I have always loved Winter.
Year after year people complain to me about the cold and the snow while wiping incessantly at their chapped noses.
Everything is wet and salty and covered in a white grime.
I was born in the winter during a snow storm my Mom said. I've been told I'm crazy for loving the cold, that I'm nuts for thinking of how beautiful the landscape is and I'm always warned about liking it now but, just wait until you have to drive in it or have to shovel or any number of other idle threats they shoot my way as they struggle to stay atop their ice covered soap box. I close my eyes and smile, because my winter is a beautiful thing.
My winter is blinding white flecked with a thousand shades of green and grey and black and wildlife donning coats of silver, red and brown.
I love the way the icy air opens my lungs and the tiny snowflakes...no two are alike....feel like Angel kisses upon my skin. But there is one experience that can only be had in winter and no other season for me and that is the complete dead silence of a winter morning. Hunters know what I mean, when you're in the woods in the early morning and not a sound to be heard no birds no wind no noise just your own breathing. Everything is soft and still and it feels as if Mother Earth is sleeping beneath your feet and all around you. When you look above there is only a canopy of haze and in front of you is a blanket of white, no tracks, no gouges, no marks of any kind just a perfectly made bed of soft downy silence.
It is the most intense of silences. I can feel it all around me. I close my eyes and I am warmed in it's protection and in it's grace. The silence doesn't last, you realize and breathe it in to your self and allow it's intensity to possess you for how ever brief it comes to visit. It is the silence that I need and crave most of my winter. Silence is underrated and not much appreciated in the screaming of this wild and woolly world in which we live. I get a sense of awakening when Autumn turns to winter. I feel like I am waking from a fitful sleep and my skin welcomes the cool air and my lungs breathe it in as though it were my first breath of life, and then I stand as still as I can be in the early morning and let the silence possess me as though it were my soul coming back to inhabit my body again and bring me back to life.  
winter is here...