Reflection
The first fall of snow is not only an event but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another, quite different, and if this is not enchant¬ment, then where is it to be found? The very stealth, the eerie quietness, of the thing makes it more magical. If all the snow fell at once in one shattering crash, awakening us in the middle of the night, the event would be robbed of its wonder. But it flutters down, soundlessly, hour after hour while we are asleep. Outside the closed curtains of the bedroom a vast transformation scene is taking place, just as if a myriad elves and brownies were at work, and we turn and yawn and stretch and know nothing about it. And then, what an extraordinary change it is! It is as if the house you are in had been dropped down in another continent… You yourselves do not feel quite the same people you were yesterday. How could you when so much has been changed?
From First Snow by J. B. Priestley
Prayer
The heavens are declaring the glory of God, and their expanse shows the work of God’s hands.
Psalm 19:1
Action
What is your reaction on awakening after a snowstorm? Delight? Dismay? Try to enjoy the wonder and beauty before facing the practicalities.
Suggested Reading
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
Isaiah 55:10-11
If you’ve ever been out for a walk just after a heavy snowfall blankets the earth and garments the trees, you know the hushed magic, the grace-filled pause that fills the space with light. It’s as if for that brief moment the snow beseeches us to see the world with fresh eyes.
Brother David Stendl-Rast
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
John Ruskin
Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.
Andy Goldsworthy
The very fact of snow is such an amazement.
Roger Ebert
May you grow still enough to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air, so that your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.
Brother David Steindl-Rast
There’s just something beautiful about walking on snow nobody has walked on. It makes you feel you’re special.
Carol Rifka Brunt
Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things. But just look what they can do when they stick together.
Vista M. Kelly
Snow isn’t just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible.
John Burnside
A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.
Carl Reiner
What good is the warmth of summer without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?
John Steinbeck
Thank goodness for the first snow. It was a reminder — no matter how old you became and how much you’d seen, things could still be new if you were willing to believe they still mattered.
Candace Bushnell
Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, “I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.”
Maya Angelou