Ode to Winter

Ode to Winter

Winter is death incarnate. Its bleak, sullen skies and early sunsets stir up a morose soup that seeps deep into my soul sadly and lingers there. I can’t digest it. I can’t shake it. I can’t get rid of it. The darkness is everywhere. Even the melancholy morning sun mourns and yearns for spring. But in our eternal disregard of the brutal truths written on the sad but truthful pages of  The Book of Our Lives, we pay no attention to it. Spring and its soft breezes of light and life are eternally far away – winter hasn’t even really been born yet.

Winter, borne on the dying breath of autumn, is shallow and tenuous at first, so ethereal and nebulous we don’t even notice that life is being slowly drained from the world around us – and from the souls within us.

We pretend the days are not getting shorter. Lawn mowers still hum as if it were summer; the occasional leaf-blower and the sound of crunching leaves try in vain to warn us that something is changing, that death approaches, that something isn’t quite right with the world.

We sip our beer and read the paper on summer patios oblivious, while the world dies and decays around us. We all pretend to forget that winter is imminent, even though frosty nights of autumn – the sentries of the darkness and death to come – leave sparkling reminders for us on our lawns and windshields each morning.

We love to look backward and dread looking forward; we see only what we wish to see. We envision nitrogen-blue skies filled with cottony summer clouds – castles, dragons, princesses, and horse heads – and ignore a world that is becoming increasingly dark. We try so hard to ignore the solemn gray tapestry of winter feasting on the last vestiges of the things of summer. While winter is busy devouring the green things and bright blue summer skies, we sip memories slowly. But there’s a chill in the air – the curtain of death is coming, and we are powerless against it.

Yet some of us still revel in the first snowflakes – the little child that remains inside us rises and urges us to catch those first few snowflakes on our tongues. Then, on that first morning, we wake to see a shimmering, crystalline blanket of white covering the world, and we are apt to celebrate its beauty with childlike wonder – all the while ignoring that it is but a harbinger of death.

Each of us lives in a world that is nothing but a fabrication, an illusion of our own making. Nothing is real. We mold our reality from the clay of memories, dreams, and hopes. At the same time, our minds are busy creating our reality, and the darkness and death of winter approach. If we are not wary, we are caught unprepared.

Winter is a juggernaut, as unstoppable as the turning and unfolding of the universe. Winter comes too quickly for some, while for others, winter cannot come quickly enough. Regardless, winter comes when it will. Some somber, cold morning, each of us will awaken to find that our winter has arrived… and with it comes a realization of could-have-beens, might-have-beens, regrets, and other broken and brittle old things, emanating from the sad and weary center of our souls now nothing but tired and dirty snow. This is the final season.

Winter: The season of broken dreams and broken promises and abandoned hope. A time when all thoughts are memories, and thoughts of the future don’t dare form.

We are born in spring, we mature in summer, we age in autumn, and reach the end of life in winter.

Winter… the last cold and brutal season of life is nothing more than the spring of death.