Chapter Text
The fundamental truth of nature: death is the fertile earth from which all life springs.
This is easy to forget in the depths of winter, when the world is cloaked in thick snowfall and the smells of the world fall away, leaving only the essence of coldness. It seems then that death will be an eternal slumber.
The night is worse. The dark casts everything into shades of blacks and whites and grays. The trees become dull stabs in the night, their branches horizontal slices. No birds sing out in the dark. No animals crunch over the snow. After a snowfall, in the deepest night, the world is wrapped in its death shroud.
This is merely the blindness of memory.
If you stand still and let your body work, you can smell the sweat of the wolf and the fear of the rabbit under the freeze—low and layered, but there. What seemed to be the crack of ice and the crash of a branch to a hard grave, is the heavy tread of a bear lumbering towards its home. The world is alive, but it is waiting—waiting for the long sleep to end. Beneath the snow, tiny sprouts rest in embryo form, protected and secure from the harsh winter.
Soon, the first warmth will come from the south and the snow and the floor of the world will turn into a muddy birthing bed. Then the world will fill with the wild hymns to life. The trees will trim their branches with finery. The birds and animals will decorate their homes in fresh twigs and grass and flowers. And new life will begin—from the ground, in the trees, in the sky—everywhere it can take hold. New life will begin. This new life will flourish and grow and live the life it is intended to live, whether small or large, beautiful or ugly. It will live.
And then, when the spring is through, the fall will come again, and all this too will pass. But in its time it feels like everything.
And it is everything.
And then it is nothing.