New Beginnings

It’s hard to imagine, in the frozen brittle white, the optimistic warmth of spring.

Or to anticipate, even, the dormant seed skins harboring unfathomed potential within the stone-hard soil.

This sleep, as we lean away from warmth and light, is also an earning.

It is the patience, hardship and sacrifice that turns the flavor of a reward sweet.

It is the grief cycle and the reforming that comes in its wake.

Colors retreat. The senses are deprived as blankets of snow soften sounds and cool the touch.

Trees and plants are reduced to a stark simplicity that ushers in light.

In this cool quiet, nature makes room.

That which emerges, when days lengthen and warm, may thrive on the drink of winter’s thaw and stretch skyward with newborn joy.

So too might we release that which is frozen and still within us, in order that bright color may again thrive.