Heroes Not Zombies

These last few days have been unusually warm for February in the Charente, so it really feels like Spring. But before I turn to the Spring section of my Japanese woodcuts, I decided to share one last Winter scene. 

I think this is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen so far. There’s just something so tranquil about it. We sure don’t think of the word tranquil when a snow storm billows through, but when we wake up in the morning and it’s snowed all night, we know, don’t we? Just from the sound. The sound of silence. 

But this is a river scene so the only lying snow is on the river bank, the trees, and the roofs of the houses. One of the houses has a light on and it’s shining out across the water just as a setting sun would cast a golden beam, or how a full moon might cast a silver one. 

Who knows where the boatman is headed but it feels like he must be heading for that house, don’t you think? There’s something about that light which has a power of attraction. It beckons. You can almost imagine the wood fire burning in the kitchen. 

What struck me most about this particular scene was how the falling snowflakes are indistinguishable from the stars in the night sky, so that we’re not quite sure whether we are looking at the stars reflected on the water, or whether those white dots are just more snowflakes about to dissolve into the river. 

I love the cycles of water. The thought of water crystallising into snowflakes in the air, falling to the surface of the Earth to dissolve in the river water, or to melt into the trees……..

Although I can’t see any in this scene, I also imagine the snow falling onto the mountaintops where it transforms into streams, or burns, as we called them in Scotland, and trickle and rush down the hillsides, gathering together to form ever wider, ever deeper streams, then rivers, which stop off to make some lakes, or lochs, as we called them!, then onwards down and down to the sea again. I imagine these snowflakes dissolving into the world’s oceans, to be sculpted up by winds and currents to make great waves, then warmed by the heat of the sun, to evaporate upwards into the air again.

What a journey! 

It’s a stunningly convincing example of the connectedness of everything.

But there’s more, because these are snowflakes falling in this scene, not raindrops. And who isn’t enchanted by the fact that every single snowflake, every single one of them, is unique. Each forming an astonishing pattern of ice crystal, each one like no other. Isn’t that amazing?

When you read about snowflakes you’ll discover that each one of them has a short life, beginning as a single water crystal, formed in a unique time and place, perhaps in a particular cloud, then growing and changing as it falls through the atmosphere, so that even if two snowflakes were very similar at their start, by the time they reach the soil, the mountain, or the river, they have each been fashioned into something completely unique. Because they’ve all had a different exact path, and have all encountered different circumstances and events which have shaped them.

It’s a bit like us really.

We each start from single fertilised cells which at least look broadly similar (even though at a molecular level each of those cells is unique) but by the time we are born we’ve developed utterly unique features, from fingerprints to irises and beyond, then as each day of life passes, our utterly unique experiences shape us, not just shaping our stories and our Selves but the very cells and structures of our bodies, from our complex web of brain cells, to our organs, our bones, our skin. 

Each of those tiny crystals looks so like a star twinkling in the night sky. 

Maybe these are stars falling into the river after all……stars bringing souls into the world.