Winter

'Despite the falling snow...'

She tells her love while half asleep,

In the dark hours,

With half words whispered low:

As Earth stirs in her winter sleep

And puts out grass and flowers

Despite the snow,

Despite the falling snow.

It has always amazed me that while we get on with surviving the dark gloominess of winter, whiling away the languorous hours of semi-daylight and assuming that all around us is dormant, "Earth puts out grass and flowers despite the snow, despite the falling snow". Robert Graves may have been equally awed, but his description is much more perspicuous than my maladroit meanderings and certainly more poetic.

Winter is not simply a time of hibernation but is rather a pause, a lull in the frenetic growth of spring and summer, a culmination of the autumnal slowing, a stillness but not a death. It is the hour for gathering strength and while we look around us and see decay and lifelessness, beneath the surface is the concentration and storing of nutrients, and the necessary constituents to provide next year's growth and renewed life.

the attenuated light of Winter....

As we walk through the woods on the shortened days in the attenuated light of winter we still see the signs of life but at a much slower pace than that experienced in the spring of the year. The ability to almost see the bracken uncurling, the leaves unfolding and stretching cat like from their buds, the grass becoming a lusher green and the daffodils bursting from their bulbs in the spring, is replaced with a latency, an unseen but still perceived strength hidden beneath the detritus of the passed year. Everything is suppressed beneath the leaf induced sussuration of our footsteps along the wayside paths, the tessellated pattern of sunlit leaves throwing splashes of colour at the eyes and the longer, brighter shadows add length to our following forms.

....even hailstorms in April.....

Yet immediately after the Christmas celebrations are over the daylight hours are lengthening too. Imperceptible at first, but gradually even the most  inward of us notices the lighter mornings, the opening out of the evening gloom into a brighter walk home, the streetlamps not quite so harsh, their glow lessened by the available natural light and the cold, biting winds seem to dissipate as the additional daylight reduces their impact to freeze our bones. Optimism for the coming spring inures us against the vagaries of the weather and we anticipate the warming sun long before it's advent. Naturally, we can be caught out; a late frost killing buds on trees, snow showers in March, or, as in April 2012, a severe hailstorm leaving the very pavements panting as the temperature dropped 6 or 7 degrees in seconds depositing in its wake a heavy mist of cold breath upon the woodland floor. But these are only brief barriers along the road to spring, the inevitability of whose arrival can only be forestalled fleetingly and the temperatures rise, the world turns - the summer solstice hastens towards us like a mother  rushing towards her long lost child....

Winter is a beautiful time too.....

In the meantime, we too should make the most of the longer evenings, the colder daytimes and the chance to recoup our energies for the long, hot months ahead....well, winter is a time to dream too....

A heavy mist of cold breath upon the woodland floor