Desert Snow

Desert Snow



Every year the snows come and every year that part of me comes back to life. Despite the cold and endless darkness the world seems more beautiful in winter.  The land stretched out like a glittering canvas, filled with shadows and secrets. Stars twinkle and shine like never before, as the moon hung bright and swollen. They are our sun here in the dark. They shed their pale scintillating light, cold and empty, on the frozen tundra. The beauty of it took my breath away

It is as if I have been living only half a life all this time. That only now am I truly alive in everything I do. At no other season are such feelings of longing and wonder evoked in me. For they are but the fleeting glory of a single summer day. Gone as quickly as they came, only to haunt the desolate bleakness of autumn.  But winter is a steady friend, constant and immoveable.

Night and day blend into one unending space buried in the ice and snow. The stillness of the bitter storm reminds me of how alone I am. Of how insignificant my life truly is in the eyes of the world. Yet here in the open everything is laid out in all of its splendid glory; my dreams and memories to carry with me always. The swish of a sled and jingle of the harness bells as the dogs run swift through the ice. The silence unshattered by voices, with only the falling snow to hear. Familiar faces hid behind fur trimmed hoods as we struggle through the storms. Icicles drape the rocky slopes as rivers freeze caught in the grip of winter.

I live in a world not suited to life. Only the determined survive here in this frozen hell, a desert of ice and snow and emptiness. I call it home, and am proud to say that where as people claim the land they live on I have been claimed by the land. No other place could hold my heart nor my soul so thoroughly and completely.  I was born here, I will live my life here, and someday find my eternal rest here.