Owed To Winter

There is a strange and gloomy beauty about winter. The naked branches of the trees against the iron gray sky, brown and trampled grass from recent snow or heavy rain, swollen gray rivers challenging their banks, all of it a raw, stark beauty. Even the sounds are dark and lonely, drip, drip, drip, of rain or melting snow, an infrequent trill of a solitary winter bird, the crunch of your footsteps on frozen ground.

My mind works hard to find the beauty in these cold dark months, I know it is there, but it seems as though it does not want me to see it. it's not an easy beauty, but harsh, cold and dark landscape.

My namesake is the sun, it is easy for me to love the warmth and light. The long lazy days of summer, ripening fruit and causing flowers to blossom. Everything is alive.  It occurs to me I would not know the warmth of the sun was such a gift, if I did not feel the chill of a biting winter wind, nor would I worship the bright warm light of a summer day, if I did not have the short gray days of winter.

Winters dark beauty works hard to escape me, but I find it. I find it in the sparkling frost on the lawn, and in the still silence of snowfall. A frozen pond, a cold damp trail winding through the forest. I find it in the knowledge that warmth will return to coax new life from what appears to be long dead.  I know life is there, just beneath the surface, resting, waiting...