Snow, a sense of place, and time
I am a John Berger fan from way back, when I read Ways of Seeing as part of my photography studies in art school. But until recently, I hadn’t read And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Last night, as the snow was starting to fall around our house in Colorado, I read a poem that spoke to me, in winter:
Distance
You have filled the thermos with coffee
packed our footprints if needed
to throw into the jaws
of the untestifying
eternal snow.
Together as carpenters with hammers
we have taught the distance
how to build a roof
from the trees
we run between.
In the silence behind
we no more hear the faraway
question of the summer house:
And tomorrow where
shall we go?
At dusk the harnessed dogs fear
there is no end to the forest.
And each night in the snow
we calm them
with our surprising laughter.
This poem speaks to anyone who has endured a winter where it is cold and snowy, where you must have everything you will need with you, including your own stories, sense of self, and confidence. Distance evokes Emerson’s Self-Reliance in its protagonists leaving a place of comfort and gone into the wilderness to make their own. As an artist, who apart from his personal work makes creative goods for a living, this is much how I feel every day. I feel like I’ve been successful in the Making of Things if I realize that sense of self-made comfort among the trees at the end of the day.
