Oh that winter sun, when it decides to shineafter long days of featureless gray!
It's like forgiveness,
like a long overdue reunion,
like a state of grace.
February's a hopeful time,
as the days begin to lengthen,
and the sunlight comes in at new angles,
penetrating those long-dark corners,
chasing away old shadows,
casting the same old world
in a whole new light.
The light of late winter touches old situations with fresh, new perspectives. It can even help you to re-see the old-seeming people and the same old places of your life. The woodlands of Northwestern Pennsylvania have their beauty in any season, but they take on a haunted feel after months of glowering gray and bitter cold. February is here, with its new radiance and new vision.
It's still winter, as it will be for a good long while. But the world is rolling back around to the light. Ah, light! You can turn your face away from it. You can avoid it, deny it, glory in its absence. But it always comes rolling back around, in time. This is the way of the world: new life, stasis, decline, death, new life, stasis, decline, death, new life, stasis, decline... Why is the old, eternal cycle always so surprising?
The Chinese have a theory about the sunny and the shady side of a mountain. One of the Daoist sages who spent so much of his time watching the play of these two phenomena said "We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away." Zhuangzi
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