Wintertime Blues?

    

    "Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does. I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there is no courage and without courage all other virtues are useless." - Ed Abbey 

    It's been difficult to see the beauty in winter lately. The New Year came and went, leaving nothing but skid rows and gunpowder burns on the cold, dark pavement. It's gotten cold, bitterly cold, a white cold that leaves the cheeks red and fingers purple, a shade mixed of hot and cold colors just like the battle between life and cold happening between them. I'm back in the mountains again, and these vast limestone ridges trap that cold much more effectively than the rivers and woods and rolling hills that I come from. Limestone holds onto the cold, doesn't let go no matter how much it shivers or squirms. 

    I've also been falling in and out of REM sleep with much less forethought as of late. I've always had a complicated relationship with sleep. I was blessed by my mother's inability to sleep in, often spontaneously waking within the middle of the night and spontaneously un-awaking about eight hours later in high school Chemistry class. I've been realizing how I can consciously dream for the first few steps of lapsing out of consciousness, and have been keeping a dream journal of these escapades, for whose eyes I do not yet know. 

    Sleep's an important thing in the cold. Animals much smarter than us at thinking like mountains have come to this conclusion thousands, no probably millions of years ago. Those fall black bears I encountered what seemed like a stomachful of years ago but was in reality a few months now have their own abdomens swollen with deer and hickory nuts and acorns as they lie in the comatose of dreamers until the snows recede. Yet, for us, life must go on! The machine must be fed! Information needs to flow fast as ever in a season meant for linking what you have with those you love, in a slow and love-full manner. 

    

    My most beautiful winter moment recently came during one of the last days of open water on the river, which I spent at one of my favorite shoulder-season holes throwing a jerkbait, managing to pluck a nice walleye out from right underneath a sunken log. 

    All of a sudden, the snowglobe of the world was shook and the sky turned every color of cold, the snow came softly falling down mixing with every water laden living thing atop me and the walleyes and the river and it was so beautiful that I wanted to freeze right then and there. I thought that if I had to describe the color blue-gray to someone who was blind all their life I would describe this moment, this moment that I realized that I was the blind one and this opened eyes to the wintertime blues, let me leap from the tomb as joyful as Lazarus into that numbing sunshine and sleet.