Monday, February 2, 2009

I get all stupid and happy

Stranger in a Strange Land - James Warhola
(big points to anyone who can give me some trivia on this one...)

The snow comes silently in the early hours and I, entranced, sit up until 3am just watching it fall. I open the windows to the flesh-ripping chill just to catch a snowflake on my tongue.

Today as I walk to lunch at Churchill's, I remember the last time I was writing here about snow in Toronto over a year ago. So much has changed in my life since the last time I felt the slip of snowdust on my cheek.

I don't know if the change is good or bad, but know that it is, all the same. Life apparently does not need my perceptions of it to be its true bad self (literally? or street? Maybe a bit from a, a bit from b). Which turns out to be just as well, seeing as my perceptions change all the time, seeing the same streets, faces and days here as sometimes liberating in moments of new found or rediscovered beauty, sometimes choking me in a stranglehold of over-familiarity, depending on my mood, the sunshine, the number of cups of coffee I have drunk.


I notice these shifts in my perceptions of the same things more and more. But their transience does not make me trust my feelings less, or give them fewer moments of my consideration to try to learn what they may mean, what they try to tell me when they come back, again and again.

Instead, I try to appreciate my feelings as I do the snow, revelling in the entirety, the novelty, the sheer discomfort of its beauty, knowing that as sure as the sun will return, every last trace will soon be gone.



2 comments:

psyconym said...

Not a clue, but nice picture and post.

x

Anonymous said...

If you mean the book, Stranger in a Strange Land, it was an early 60's novel by Robert Heinlein about a human raised by martians who comes back to earth knowing nothing about it or it's people, sets up his own church preaching free love & individual freedom. It was said to have been the inspiration behind the hippie communes of the sixties.
Also a title of an episode from Lost.