That Quality of Awe

I recently shared an excerpt from Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. This evening I share another one, a sharing inspired by today’s light dusting of snow.

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Try as I might, I can’t produce the adult hardness towards a snowfall, full of resentment at the inconvenience. I love the inconvenience the same way that I sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside your normal habits. I love the visual transformation it brings about, that recolouring of the world into sparkling white, the way that the rules change so that everybody says hello as they pass. I love what it does to the light, the purplish clouds that loom before it descends, and the way it announces itself from behind your curtains in the morning, glowing a diffuse whiteness that can only mean snow. Heading out in a snowstorm to catch the flakes on my gloves, I love the feeling of it fresh underfoot. I am rarely childlike and playful except in snow. It swings me into reverse gear.

Snow creates that quality of awe in the face of a power greater than ours. It epitomizes the aesthetic notion of the sublime, in which greatness and beauty couple to overcome you – a small, frail human – entirely.

– Katherine May
Excerpted from Wintering: The Power
of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Riverhead Books
pp. 164-165

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Photo of the Day – December 7, 2019
• In Minneapolis, A Snowy February Friday
• After the Season's First Snowstorm, a Walk Through the Neighborhood
• First Snowfall
• Winter of Content
• Brigit Anna McNeill on “Winter’s Way”
• Winter Beauty
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2020)
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2019)
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond (2017)
• Winter Light
• A Winter Walk Along Minnehaha Creek
• Winter Storm (2016)
• Winter Storm (2012)
• Winter’s Return
• Three Winter Gatherings
• In Wintry Minnesota, An Australian Afternoon Tea

Image: “Skylight View” by Michael J. Bayly.