snow storm

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The phone rang at 5 this morning -- a single ring which was enough to wake me up and remind me to stir my stumps: Snow had been forecast and I needed to help shovel my wife's car out. The call, however, was from her work, telling her that the doctor's consortium would be closed. Not delayed ... closed. I wonder where the people who need medical help go when no one can get anywhere.

The snow is still swirling. What is probably only 6-8 inches is being whipped like cream -- drifting in smooth, white waves over cars and roof tops and the decorative bushes around neighborhood houses. It is beautiful and it is pristine and, when I allow my mind to consider it, it will all need to be shoveled.

The wonderful thing about snow or a black-out or some other natural disruption is that it brings people together. Bickering and philosophy take a back seat -- who's got time for that bullshit? Really, it's better than the self-serving blandishments of Face Book for bringing people together. This is like death or birth or sleep ... a no-nonsense fact.

If only for a little while, it is as life were saying, "Serious up!" It is simultaneously soothing and frightening. Soothing because it is easy and natural and there is no need to DO something about something that defies any sort of doing. Frightening, perhaps, because the perspective it lends to what is ordinarily 'important' ... all those thoughts and worries and plans for which life displays no care. It's not fun being called an idjit.

And that sense of relaxing, of being at the whim of circumstances, is a good thing, I think -- a good place from which to evaluate and investigate and review: What is serious in my life and what is merely solemn? As if some ancient central American civilization had been swallowed by the jungle, there is the opportunity to consider the jungle that swallowed it ... and continues to swallow hopes, dreams and horrors without so much as a by-your-leave.

Well, it's white out there. White -- the color of purity. White -- the color of Japanese mourning. White -- the color that laughs at the notion of "color."
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