White Blanket
A blanket of snow, at least six inches covers everything. I imagine that this day could be recognized as a opportunity for the minimum, the most basic of chores, a day for rest and reflection. Not so for us who live in towns and suburbs. A snow fall presents an obstacle to be overcome, conditions to be managed primarily with snow removal plows and melting agents. Our life is lived, must be lived by the constant demands of vast productive machine of society. We are hardly individuals in this scene. Are we not more like cogs in a machine, parts valuable to the extent that they keep functioning? What is the functioning for? What of the whole, formed, held together by a vast, inconceivable net of empathy, awareness, transcending all of us?
Is mystic unity between life, the individual, Nature, and divinity possible? Is it possible to find this meaning, to trace out by symbols, to actualize by rites a spiritual meaning of existence, to live this sacredness? Is it possible to feel that life is both real and sanctified—-
….not merely an endless series of blind, psycho-physiological automatisms, useless and in the last reckoning absurd.
—excerpt Myths, Dreams and Mysteries by Mircea Eliade page 217
