Winter, season of renewal

Spring : celebrated season of the vegetable flow : flowers, light and life. By contrast, scorned winter evokes numbness -frost, night and death. This vision of winter is too sad for me, and I think it is inexact. It needs to be amended. Frost : for sure, but not every day (in our European latitudes). Night ? Days are only shorter. Sun and blue sky are not a rare thing in December or January. Death ? The vegetable dormancy is secret, warm and concentrated life. In my garden, robins and blackbirds come and go and fly about everyday. Nature knows no off season. One of the most inspirational Emerson's phrases says : ''Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year'' (in Works and Days). So every February's day is also the best day.

There are three differences in winter : colder temperatures, shorter days and vegetable dormancy. No lack of intensity for all the rest : air is air, water is water -drops, rivers and seas, waves and foam -and ice is only solid water, soil is soil, and wood, stones, metals, sky and stars and every material thing.

And the substance of material things is always active. Matter in its innermost parts is so active that it is an illusion to think an atom is inert and physically the same during the shortest moment one can conceive : it doesn't cease to be a different thing, a new thing, at every moment.

Go outside in winter : and look at the blue -or dark and windy sky, at waters, and stones and trees' bark and branches -is there any lack of intensity in all these things ? Is wintry physical reality actually dull and dead ? My perception, my senses tell me : Nature is as fresh and new in December as in May. Winter, like other seasons, is a season of renewal, because Nature is a continuous renewal. At every moment Nature is a new object. Reality is always new.

Low temperatures and long nights : inconveniences for our practical needs. For our soul, Nature's incessant physical newness may be an incessant joy.