The Spirit of Winter

In winter, the air becomes a living presence, more than in any other season. Its touch on your face or hands becomes a palpable and enveloping presence. Always lingering right on your skin, constantly seeking a way down your neck, up your sleeves, and up from the ground through the soles of your shoes to grip your toes, it is relentlessly testing whether you are ready to stay out in it. The cold is never malevolent, just powerful and steady, pulling the heat from you like the pull of time, unstoppable, clear, and honest. When we move along, parting its invisible almost liquid space, we place ourselves in a subtle tug for life. We become more alive. Our fingers and toes are the first objects that measure how we are faring in the weather. Our faces, especially our noses, ears, and cheeks react to the cold as if they were being pinched and rubbed with sandpaper. This rough feeling on our skin originates from one of the most gentle and delicate objects on earth, air that acquires the power of death, carried by cold. Cold is a trait of the absence of energy, yet cold pulls energy and life to it. Like an abyss, the cold can pull you into an irreversible fall to oblivion, yet it does not seek you out specifically; it moves along enveloping everything in its steady grip.