I am thinking that what is true of snow is also true of experience. Our daily experiences "snow" upon our sense of self, our storehouse of memory, the "trail" that we are breaking that is our life journey.A lot of our life experience is "buried" by new experience, but some remains visible, some memories remain accessible; there is still some evidence of where we have passed, even though severe "wind" can take even those experiences away.
For me, writing can access some of those experiences, sensory memories to replicate and revise for a purpose. Maybe this is why writers and artists in general have a reputation for living life more fully. Our experiences are not so apt to be buried and forgotten in the snows of our passing days. Our experiences, our memories, are the raw materials of our craft.
To contact that greater Self is essential for the artist so that we are not buried in the avalanche of our remembered experience; rather, we ski upon the slopes of our life, winter not a frozen desolation but an opportunity for flight.
Our artistic works are not solitary footprints but long, sweeping calligraphies of connectedness. "Snow falls equally in the track and around it," and as writers we are both the tracks and all that surround.
"I am the totality." Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.4.10
Copyright 2009 by Thomas L. Kepler, all rights reserved
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