Winter's White Light
The winter here in the Piedmont of Virginia, just east of and in sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains, has been more severe than others that I can remember in recent years -- temperature-wise that is. It's the kind of weather toward which skeptics of global warming are surely pointing, and never mind how much all the fresh water from the melting Antarctic ice shelf might be already disrupting the all-important ocean current called the "conveyor belt," which is responsible for keeping eastern North America and western Europe temperate.
We've only gotten one snowfall, it's true, and that was nearly three weeks ago, and it amounted to little more than two inches. Yet here in what I call our "frost pocket" of a little creek valley, small patches of that snow still can be seen, especially in my lower garden, which borders the creek. We're lucky that right after that snowfall, we had enough days in the 40's to melt most of it, or else we'd be in trouble, because it's been so cold ever since, with morning temps of 15 and 7 degrees F becoming routine.
At around 7:30 this A.M., in daylight though long before the sun started showing over the ridgetop trees to the south across the creek, the landscape suddenly took a peculiar tint, and for a few minutes everything was bathed in an extremely pale light, as if Nature had mixed more white than usual with its other colors.
I was tempted but I knew I had to avoid saying instead that Nature had stirred in too much white. That's because Nature keeps everything in such unerring balance, including what it chooses to put on its brush, it never applies to the canvas of the planet mixtures of colors that are out of key with each other.
--In the highly unlikely event that a bonfide religionist should ever read the above passage, I can easily imagine he or she sneering and saying, "Why must this infidel always turn aside from the Truth that has been Revealed for so long and that requires that he should always say 'God' instead of 'Nature?'
That kind of thing is among the many reasons that I chose to leave the fold and to spend my days instead wandering through the wilderness of the non-religious. One finds among the "faithful" far too many of the ungenerous in spirit.
We've only gotten one snowfall, it's true, and that was nearly three weeks ago, and it amounted to little more than two inches. Yet here in what I call our "frost pocket" of a little creek valley, small patches of that snow still can be seen, especially in my lower garden, which borders the creek. We're lucky that right after that snowfall, we had enough days in the 40's to melt most of it, or else we'd be in trouble, because it's been so cold ever since, with morning temps of 15 and 7 degrees F becoming routine.
At around 7:30 this A.M., in daylight though long before the sun started showing over the ridgetop trees to the south across the creek, the landscape suddenly took a peculiar tint, and for a few minutes everything was bathed in an extremely pale light, as if Nature had mixed more white than usual with its other colors.
I was tempted but I knew I had to avoid saying instead that Nature had stirred in too much white. That's because Nature keeps everything in such unerring balance, including what it chooses to put on its brush, it never applies to the canvas of the planet mixtures of colors that are out of key with each other.
--In the highly unlikely event that a bonfide religionist should ever read the above passage, I can easily imagine he or she sneering and saying, "Why must this infidel always turn aside from the Truth that has been Revealed for so long and that requires that he should always say 'God' instead of 'Nature?'
That kind of thing is among the many reasons that I chose to leave the fold and to spend my days instead wandering through the wilderness of the non-religious. One finds among the "faithful" far too many of the ungenerous in spirit.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 9:54 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home