December 31, 2008
Into the white
Last week, during the long weekend, I went for a walk at Natirar, a local park along the North Branch of the Raritan River. It first opened to the public sometime within the last few years, but I hadn’t gotten around to checking it out before — and admittedly that day might have not been the best time for a visit, considering that it was intensely foggy and the ground was still covered with an icy crust of snow. But I had an imperative need to go for a walk by a river, so off I went along the path less traveled by, over the creaking, half-melted ice sheets and down to the water’s edge.
And there was one point, as I was walking next to the river, where the great field opened out on my other side, an expanse of snow vanishing into the fog that came down to meet it — imagine white on white, so that the eye struggles to find something to focus on and fails, so that vision blurs and all the dark floaters that one usually doesn’t notice dart and crawl like tiny insects across one’s sight. Eerie and wonderful, like suddenly being set adrift in another, dreamlike world, utterly empty, with only the murmur of the river for company.
Today is the Feast of Sokar, hawk-headed God of the moment of suspension, the instant of perfect stillness between day and night, life and death. And here we are almost on the tipping point between the old year and the new. Tonight, I want to make time for stillness, for silence, to feel that hush once more before I step forward into a new and extraordinary world.