A Vision of Winter...

I left the warm comforts of my house, last night, to behold the most beautiful vision of nature. It was about 11:30 pm. I slid a pair of snow boots on and tugged on a light jacket that hung by the door and dashed outside. As I pushed the sliding glass door closed, I shut away the noises of the kitchen and the buzz of the thermostat, and a myriad of other noises I had not been aware of. My senses immediately shifted. Silence pressed against my ears and the cold air stung my bare skin, as I had intelligently donned a pair of cotton running shorts. Several paces through knee deep snow brought me well into the mercy of the night. My eyes adjusted to the light that the full moon produced and reflected brilliantly off the breast of the snow. I had never seen anything like it…I stood in the middle of a dazzling field of shimmering light, sparkling from the iced-over branches--whose tangled shadows wrapped softly across the earth. The glittering snow, as if millions of tiny diamonds had been crushed to a powder and accumulated here, settling peacefully in a thick layer across this frozen tundra. I turned my gaze to the sky and drank in the icy heaven. A peaceful navy blanket of atmosphere, studded with diamonds, extended above my insignificant stature to a height I could only imagine. It wrapped around the whole earth and covered every human being that ever lived. Directly above my quiet house was the full moon. A perfectly round orb of celestial radiance, brilliantly burning the reflected light of the sun into the back of my retinas. When I closed my eyes, the moon was still there in a frosty, ghostly image against my lids. I felt the miles of cold air above my physical body and the perpetually frozen vacuum of ancient space above that, and somehow I was connected to the earth and floating in heaven at the same time.