Winter can brutalize. 
Winter can sensitize. 
Winter can prioritize. 
Winter can fill our eyes with stinging tears of loss and regret and sadness. 

As we tilt away from the sun, a chill fills the air around us 
And it seems the end of something. 
But what is the end if not the beginning
Of whatever is next? 
I don’t know this, but I feel it. I can’t show this, but it steels me
Against despair. 

Buds to flowers to fruit to seed. 
Children born and raised, grown and gone. 
Are we dead or just asleep?
Or is this sleep a way to abandon our attachment to one way of knowing?
What if we allow the chilly air to clarify, the ice to crystallize, 
The snow to bury, erase, and simplify? 

When I wake to a thick coat across the landscape, it makes the familiar strange, 
And the strange gives me permission to set aside my habits, 
To make new choices, to be someone I have not yet been. 

And when the snow melts, will I be this or that or something else entirely?
No one knows, not even
Winter. 

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