fyer, fyer! my heart!

What I love about winter is the hardness of it. Winter is hard. Brutal sometimes. It steals the breath straight from your gut, it pushes you forward and backward no matter where you're trying to go. Winter adds obstacle upon obstacle to normal life: Walking on even sidewalks grows challenging when the ice is invisible and the packed-on snow adds grip-impeding texture to sidewalks for which no one will claim responsibility. One is certainly much less agile in layers (even soft, loving layers) of wool, cashmere, down, leather, and fleece. Even the act of breathing--something so basic so as to be usually unnoticed--becomes a hurdle as the icy dry air cuts slivers into your nose and drives daggers into your chest.

In the places where grass usually grows in the summer, mountains of sludgy gray snow steal color from the cityscape. Gray-brown skeletons of unbelievably living trees flatten against the gray sky. Gray buildings bleed gray slush running down to gray sidewalks, spilling over into gray streets. Ash-tender gray leaves flutter beneath clumps of gray snow to be picked at by gray birds who fly and huddle in gray masses.

Winter is the most beautiful time of the whole year. Can you survive this hard beauty? Can you be the color in a gray world? Can you breathe the sharp air, feel it slice its way into your lungs, and smile from the exhilarating aliveness the pain brings with it? Can you wait for spring and find the waiting beautiful--the waiting itself? Can you sit in the death of the world and glory in it--without trivializing it? Without running away?

Can you be broken, hour by dark hour, by the unrelenting challenges of winter? Can you let the cold seep into your bones and still find warmth to share with others? Can you be the fire by which others warm their frostbitten hearts?

What I love about winter is that it doesn't let you off easy. It doesn't let you bring anything less than everything you've got. Only the hardest of winters could push you to build the hottest of fires, could make survival depend upon the most intense, most passionate desire to live.