The Dancing Frost

The winter holidays are over today and Jack Frost painted patterns across the windows of the engawa for the pleasure of the children. The engawa forms an air lock between the inner house and the elements, and though we are warm in our little cocoon, the frost still descends and the pipes still freeze.

Each pane of glass has a different design, no two are the same. This is the beauty and wonder of pattern in nature. The elements of the material world find form through aligning themselves with the interacting forces of nature. These infinitely variable combinations give rise to a never ending parade of unrepeatable beauty. A beauty that we humans can appreciate.

We too are the product of those forces, our physical beings built of elemental building blocks, constructed by universal forces, driven by life in its desire to become. We are the stuff of the universe, self conscious, aware of our being. We experience the world around us and find the things within it, the things which are born of this natural process, beautiful and good.

Beauty and good, however, are abstract and immeasurable ideas that only we, thus far, have found reason and means to communicate. The rest of the universe simply is. It's elements rearrange themselves endlessly in an ever changing dance. This mornings frost will evaporate into the water vapour that it was, and perhaps tomorrow it will be mist, and the next day it may be snow, only to melt in the spring to be a river, a lake, a glass of water, me.

Our spirit, our consciousness, is as real as any other thing in this sea of stars. Even though we cannot measure it, it exists as surely as the frost on the window pane. It has it's time in this form, and looks at the world in wonder. We are the universe, looking at itself, giving itself abstract meaning, the universe made self conscious. We have this time to live and love, and through our art and literature pass that on to those who follow in this ever lasting dance.