It snowed here at the foot of the mountains. But the snow didn’t drift from the heavens with soft, serene grace. It plonked down in fat, wet clumps—loose snowballs hurled by vicious little fists in the sky. The snow plopped weirdly into puddles on the road. For all its grassy fields filled with dancing fireflies under brilliant starlight, nature acts also in pained awkwardness and physical intensity
which makes me think of the frequent, ambivalent, useful (purposeful) violence of nature…
The short sad, ecstatic life of Laura Gilpin’s two-headed calf…
The often slow, undignified starvation of so many deaths.
How our anthropomorphizing and enchantment narratives about nature attempt to imbue it with essential qualities—grace, beauty, symmetry, softness, thriving—which it consistently fails to possess at the scale of the particular, even where thriving occurs at the scale of the general.
I enjoyed watching the clumsy snow streak down in slow, clumsy clusters of shrapnel, and splatter, from where I stood at the window, simultaneously annoyed that it doesn't look like it feels like spring outside. That's ok. We'll be there soon enough. The Rockies play in a tantric sort of springtime. Teasing, easing forward into new thresholds of warmth and presence and vitality, receding back into the winter of sparseness, distance and layers between…
I take comfort. This cold harshness, life experienced as a jagged edge rather than a gentle, sweeping slowness, it isn’t as unnatural as we might think. These exasperated tones, and deep sighs, and slammed doors, and violent separations of even that which had previously been a thriving interconnectedness, this disjointedness and disenchantment and long, sharp pangs of unbearable loneliness, and the anxiety that wonders if this is at all how it’s supposed to be… these might all be just as natural as the fists of wet ice splashing clumsily into dirty puddles outside my window. And how we flee for shelter, how we build crude and then beautiful structures around us of wood and brick and metaphor and glass and relationships and words to hide from this harshness… this too is natural.
And if it is as all natural things are, this harshness too will recede. And as it recedes in our memories, we will be empowered to remake it, informed by wider lenses, to perhaps have been a particular and painful part of something graceful, beautiful, soft, and symbolic all along.