Midnight Snowing

When I walked to the studio, the blizzard of December 26th was in full fury. It was afternoon and already accumulations promised something of epic proportions. I have been working in the studio into the night. At around 9 p.m. I walked to the Space Market for some take out. No one was about. There were no footprints, no tire tracks. There was only the wind and the street lights filtered through gusts of snow. Trudging through the snow in the night storm for only a block was a struggle. Waverly Place had become a wilderness. Returning to the studio was also an adventure. The door to the building was blocked with snow even though I had been gone less than thirty minutes. I cleared the snow and opened the door.

Through the window in my studio, I saw the swirling snow, thick and turbulent, buffeting the street lamps, relentlessly screening the light in surging, shifting patterns. The intensity seemed to be escalating, ominous and fierce. Bursts of wind rattled the windows. It was as though the storm were demanding my full attention. I improvised a few answers from the keyboard as the blizzard blustered and bellowed in reply.

My earlier impression of the snow as I came to the studio in early afternoon was of the quiet stillness all around me, sounds muted by an eloquent mantle of silence. Midnight moved me to the next day, and now the night and the storm seemed to wait in ambush for me to venture outside. The snow had packed around the door. In addition, the doors had frozen. I pushed hard and broke the seal. Then I gradually cleared the snow by pushing the door like a shovel to clear a path.

Stepping outside I entered a tumultuous tempest that stung my face with icy blasts of snow. The wind was so strong that snowflakes felt like pellets. I tried to look ahead and could see only a few feet. There were no tracks in the snow. It was 12-14 inches deep. I moved forward and felt my boots sink into the snow. I couldn't even distinguish the steps to the ramp. so I clutched the railing and eased myself down to the snow-covered sidewalk. It was difficult to see where the sidewalk ended and the street began. I started toward home with some difficulty. Walking required more strength and energy than I had anticipated because of the depth of the snowdrifts and the strident wind and ice-like snow pellets stinging me in the face. Suddenly this setting that was so familiar became an alien terrain, and I felt lost and disoriented. I seriously began to wonder if I could actually make it to the apartment only a few blocks away.

Washington Place seemed to be like a canyon in a blizzard and the visibility was at best 20-25 feet. I walked in the middle of the street as I made my way toward Washington Place. Overhead, I could hear the wind ripping at the NYU Steinhardt flag. I heard thunder punctuating the sound of wind through the trees and corridors between buildings.

"So this is what it would be like if I were miles from civilization and trapped in such a storm with no shelter. There would be no way out." My apprehension grew as I made extremely slow progress toward Bleecker Street. No one was outside. There were no cars on the streets. In a city of millions I felt suddenly alone as though I were a stranger on an uninhabited planet, or maybe come upon a vanished civilization that had built these buildings and mysteriously disappeared.

The sounds of the storm became mesmerizing, and I labored with each step... the bitter cold was beginning to penetrate my coat and my face was freezing. My eyebrows became icy. Now it was becoming increasingly impossible to see. My glasses had iced over. They were useless. As I removed them, the blowing snow attacked my eyes. I stumbled and fell, but the snow cushioned my fall. I realized how foolish it was to think I could easily walk through such a powerful and hostile storm. Now my beard was frozen, and I was utterly exhausted. I managed to pull myself erect and continued on.

As I finally arrived at Bleecker Street, I thought how the elements had distorted my sense of time and space. A few blocks became an adventure in the twilight zone. My midnight encounter with the snowstorm reminded me of the awesome power of nature that challenges our artificial sanctuaries and fortresses of civilization. All of our achievements can be confronted and extinguished in the blink of an eye. The universe can be exceedingly cold and hostile.

Song of Winter Solstice

Having passed through the immense darkness of December, winter solstice sings to me of such hopeful anticipation. The metaphor of the triumph of light over darkness is a melody that deepens with each phrase, harmonies of some distant realm flow in cascading counterpoint. 

It begins so simply. I leave my office. The day has been a bright, pristine winter day. I have sought the presence of friends on the Internet, but everyone is away, engaged in the last minute hysteria of Christmas Eve in the midst of so much unfinished business that needs attention and the last minute shopping forays to stores rushing to close in early afternoon. 

Night has descended unannounced, and I walk along Washington Place toward the park. Church bells chime from the north and others echo somewhere to the south. From a distance, I hear carolers singing "Fast away the old year passes..." and the air seems filled with singing. The singing originates from the brightly lit Christmas Tree framed by the Washington Square Arch. Their singing echoes against the surrounding buildings, and the texture blends with the city sounds, the music of New York settling into the night before Christmas.

 Everything seems so magical in the moment. I wonder if I really exist, or if I am just some character walking in Washington Square in an O. Henry short Christmas story. Maybe I dwell in this moment as part of the Gift of the Magi. That would be just like O. Henry: to have me discover at the end that I am really just a character in one of his stories. 

I turn the corner and head toward Bobst Library as the music resonates and resounds around me and within my mind. It is the song of solstice. Music becomes the source of light and I see the music in some fantastic array of media celebrating the consciousness of awareness that we are the witness of life and the universe. 

It is media unlike anything I have ever known... vibrations articulating reality oscillating and forever pulsating with the stuff of life. Music is light shining and Light is the radiance of all sound, of all music. We are the pulsing awareness of our defining source. 

We are the substance and light of the universe. We are the light that translates the darkness, the sound that interprets the silence. 

That is the song of solstice. 

We are the Song of Winter Solstice.

Darkness in December

It is a source of amazement to me how much difference a year can make in how we relate to the world about us, our friends, and those we hold in close and intimate regard. As I sit at the computer and watch the darkness invade the city at 4:30 p.m., I feel like some lonely wanderer at Stonehenge waiting for winter solstice. This darkness is a source for melancholy and in some instances, despair. What a difference a year makes.

At this same point last year, winter solstice was a cause for hope and inspiration. I was bolstered by a new energy which countered my usual dismal December demeanor. That new energy came from connecting with friends who created an open space for sharing and collaborating that was new to me. Solstice was discovery... the anticipation of light... a rebirth and renaissance.

This solstice awakening took me to new places of awareness and energized my thinking and creative ideas. It was more than a revival, it was the birth of a new sensibility, an intense consciousness that filled the silence with ineffable beauty infused with radiance. These inspirations were concretized into new work. There was a sense of invincibility about this aura that embraced me so completely. Nothing was impossible. Every manifestation was effortless. I felt that everyone around me was imbued with imagination, energy, and a zest for life. My own world was enriched by the interpenetration of overlapping spheres of energy and vision. Every moment led to new expression, new destinations, new accomplishments.

But that was then. Now in these bleak December days approaching the longest night, I find myself visited by the demons of despair. Something tells me that this is a necessary plunge into "the jaws of darkness," the acherontic abyss of inevitable emptiness. It is not the silence. Silence is beautiful. This dark emptiness is sinister and hideous. This darkness is the oppressive anguish of sorrow and despair. The sorrow stems from the unspeakable regret that all of us must suffer through the limits of our humanity although we glimpse the hem of something astonishing and full of wonder just beyond our grasp. The despair is beyond all sighing. Its heaviness is paralyzing, debilitating.

But in the midst of this destructive descent, I sense outstretched arms and and life-lines flung from those who share the journey... who whisper that despite all appearances, you are not alone. Of course I realize this is the fiction of hope. Objectivity tells me to lie down and die. It isn't that those who included me last year have gone on to other things and left me alone. It is that I have somehow blindly abandoned the interior paths of discovery that others helped illuminate.

But there is this moment of intense night which seemingly has extinguished the light.... there is this infinite moment of darkness when I realize that the darkness is only a shadow. Light envelops the darkness, defines itself through the eloquence of its presence. In the precise moment of winter solstice, I listen to the night giving birth to some new possibility. The dawn that awaits is unique and unlike any other. That is the lesson of the cycles of infinity. All repetition is fiction. Only new moments exist, arcing inexorably through conscious awareness. We are not the repetition of the past. We are not the repetitions of ourselves.