Snow Like Diamonds

Tonight I was walking home from the train stop. It was very slick outside because of a slushy snowfall- the kind that is pretty for half a day until it apologetically turns to grey slime in its inability to really band together in drifts. The streetlamps made the ground look like it was sheathed in diamonds. I thought about writing something like that as a metaphor- snow like millions of tiny diamonds. And then I thought, how strange to describe a natural phenomenon by likening it to another. Frozen water and rock. I thought how much humans value diamonds and love them. I thought of how a diamond isn't a thing from the earth anymore. It is a sacred object. Something we find instead of mine, something we tend instead of cull. A diamond is forever.

What is it with us, anyway? Wanting to hold everything in our hand. Is the heart of the drive to civilize really the desire to stop time? Snow like diamonds. In having the diamond or the cubit zirconium, or even fake snow machines, we can have the vision whenever we want it. Forever, without any pesky contextualization. Are we so afraid we will never see these miraculous things again? Do we need to hold everything in our hand, tuck it in our pocket to really understand it?

The truth is, that snow tonight was beautiful. And no one will ever know this beyond my telling of it. Because only I saw it when I did, where I did, and in the way that I did. My day at school, my life leading up to that day, my particular gait down the sidewalk all collided and coalesced in that one moment. The snow like diamonds was not the gift. The moment was the gift, and the moment was the diamonds. In any other place or time, they would not be what they were. They would not remind me that this earth is beautiful and forever changing.

Do fleeting things bother us because they portend our own mortality? I hope the answer is no. I hope we have not always been so afraid of what is inevitable. I hope we have not always been so out of synch with the natural order of things that we have always been terrified to partake in one of its main rites.

Temporality is nothing to be conquered, avoided, undone. Indeed, if things are fleeting- if there is a snowfall like diamonds just for one night, then all things shall pass, and we can have our faith that life finds a way to remake itself all the time. This is a comforting faith when I go to bed on some cold winter nights, wrapped in a blanket, and assessing a day of which I am not particularly fond or proud.

It is okay because there was a slushy snowfall, and before that, there was snow like diamonds.

Karl Anemone

After spending the day with Marx and Engels, I have to say that I feel utterly drained. Good reading, but totally tapped out. Trying to write out a lesson plan for The Communist Manifesto has also zapped a lot of my energy. I'm walking a fine line between trying to be open that I am a learner too, while not looking like a guide who doesn't know what she's doing. Tricky indeed.

In tandem with reading this document for class, I started Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild. This thing is absolutely rocking my world. I was up until 4 in the morning reading because I just couldn't stop. Renee Askins is a wise soul and with a musical way of telling her stories. I finished chapter two and just began sobbing uncontrollably. This book resonates like you wouldn't believe. I have a feeling this book has a great deal to teach me, and has come to me at an important moment.

I was just thinking about the portion of the Manifesto in which M&E go into man's isolation from the natural world. Cities have tamed and paved over all that is wild and free, all that makes us connected to a larger web. For M&E, this related to the whole alienation bit that they are going on about. (By the way, I like to say M&E really fast in my mind so it sounds like sea anemone. You have to add the sea bit yourself, but it makes for a fun little private game. ...at least for me, it does.)

From Karl to Renee, this question begins to loom large in my mind's conception of human history. Where did the wild go?