First Snow

What is midnight as the first snow falls but midnight as the first snow falls? And it's no use being clever but the gifts are there to be used. As D. says when burning deadfall and passing the Old Crow, "God made man and God made trees but it was man made chain saws." And whiskey? Well, we do what we can, and what else really can we do? Awareness, properly understood (how tired I am of that word), is never not here and that realization is the beginning of what we call awakening (I do think that's a pretty helpful word). Seeing the seer, realizing the observer and the observed are not separate but one, and so on and so forth. By midday the snow will be gone but at midnight or just after it falls so quiet that you don't want to go inside but only stand in stillness always. Our brains are mechanical more than anything: just try to will what you don't will and see how it works (or doesn't work, actually). What is God but accepting that resistance to what is is futile? A lot of people appreciate my poetic bullshit but fail to see I'm basically describing the same tractor over and over. God made the field, God made the farmer but the farmer made . . . what exactly? Sometimes ardor dims the closer we get to the object of desire. We insist that Heaven is getting what we want but that's not it at all and never was: we don't actually want what we want. Want merely obscures what knows it already has everything. And the snow falls anyway, doesn't it? Ten thousand times ten thousand soft flakes settling aimlessly on the living and the dead and all that lies between and it doesn't ask our permission nor give a goddamn about beauty. Grace it turns out is only letting go so you can let go even more. Darling when I turn my face to the dark sky a thousand cold kisses reach me and behind them float a thousand more and I am standing there still, arms open, embracing you the only way I know.