Winter has Arrived
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Today at 05:44 am EST the Winter solstice went down without a hitch bringing with it the season of Winter in all it's chilly glory.
Though I certainly find myself lacking in the spiritual transcendence of a "Groundhog Day" epiphany where the coarse becomes the epitome of refinement, I can say that the seasons bring with them a certain softening of those edges which constitute that edgy thing called me.
For that reason alone I try to relish the changing of the seasons as a mode of self modification and thereby improvement resulting in the next iteration of whom I grow into at each successive stage of the game.
An Old Man’s Winter Night
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.
Robert Frost 1920 from Mountain Interval