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Post-Snow Be, Contemplate, Imagine (Biomimetic Practice Session 1)

From February 1st, 2025 – Conditions: Snowy, then cautiously sunny.

This exercise started as a prompt from my biomimicry class to go out and do a sequence of nature immersion activities in order to connect with my senses and contemplate my greater connection with nature. I didn’t venture too far from my back door because I live on a picturesque five acres of forest and meadow and pond, and when I started this activity it was snowing, so I elected not to get covered with a layer of downy and freezing white flakes. Still, I was able to sit and close my eyes and then overlook the wintry scene.

Because I have kids and they are super active, I couldn’t simply sit and completely immerse myself as described, and that has to be okay – however, I will note that a part of this experience was the re-realization that kids are a part of nature, and humans are a part of a set of relationships we call human-environmental interactions, that largely set the tone for the experience of ‘wild’ and ‘human’ parts wherever we live. So some of this had me getting up and walking around a bit with my little ones to experience the snow fall and marvel at the world revealed when the sun came out.

With eyes closed, the first thing to note is the insane quiet when the snow is coming down – but it’s a dense quietness. There is the slight muffled hiss from millions of flakes landing all around, of course, and in some cases that takes on a beefy ‘mumf’ as a large flake falls apart to join the others in the heap. Notably the morning which was full of birdsong is conspicuously absent of all but this pervasive abiotic cacophony of silence. I say a cacophony of silence because it’s so bizarre but a dense snowfall is one of the simultaneously quietest things to hear but loudest things to experience, it is so all-encompassing. Just as I began to think this was all I would experience for this part of the journey, the clear tlok of a raven broke the riotous calm, ringing and rattling throughout my consciousness. I hardly ever hear them stop by, so this was interesting, the fact that one was here now of all times was notable. It didn’t get a response, though it continued to call periodically for a few minutes, as if having a conversation with the snow itself.

During this time and later upon opening my eyes, the thought occurred to me that this muffled ever-present hiss was so familiar as to almost be the sound of my consciousness itself. It was comforting like a blanket and it felt like I could drift into it like a dream. With open eyes, it was pretty dreamy as well, with the white blanket of slowflakes curtaining the world in thicker and thicker swaths. I saw the raven, atop the deadened peak of an old cedar across the field, and wondered, in my silly human-centered way, if he was talking to me. I noticed the outstretched tips of branches getting covered in snow, witnessed the capacity of the snow to stick to itself with an almost static bond, and had to wonder if there was some purpose to the trees doing this – do they benefit in some way physically from the contact of these small piles of loosely-conglomerated ice crystals with their needles, even once a year, or is it a psychological thing – do they enjoy it, almost like how we hold out our hands to catch snowflakes in order to see them. I catch a whiff of kindred in that moment between these beings and ourselves then realize it’s silly, in a way – the trees are always like that, they can’t help holding out their fronds like that, it’s the same way to ‘catch’ sunbeams for photosynthesis. Still, the resemblance is uncanny and I can’t shake the feeling, it comforts me almost like the sound of that ever-present hiss.

The sun comes out, shining through the snow still falling, though not as thickly now. I keep expecting to see a rainbow at the opposite end of the sunbeams and have to remind myself that’s not how snow works, though it doesn’t stop me from looking. I wonder how many other humans have had this thought over time, in those liminal moments when sun and snow happen to coexist for the briefest fraction of time. I walk around a bit, exploring different parts of the yard, feeling the soft yielding of new powder over the slight crunch of last night’s frozen layer. Some of the flakes have already started to melt on the Japanese maple and the rhododendron, which is odd when compared to the evergreens who seem to be a picturesque statue of wintry-ness right out of a Christmas catalog. I bend over and look at the sunlight through droplets and wonder at how if at all the plants and animals may experience such beauty and if so, where are the equivalent of ‘eyes’ on a rhododendron, and what colors are available to a sparrow in the prism of a melted snow-droplet. Throughout it all the raven’s continued tlok drops like a drumbeat periodically interrupting, or is it punctuating, my train of thought.

There are more thoughts than that which occurred to me, but I will have to get better at recording them all soon after these experiences because they are so ephemeral or esoteric as to have drifted through me like a ghost, still locked in that space-time of dreams, bound up in the deafening quiet pillow of a million snowflakes.

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