Snow

It has been prohibitively cold for the last week. So cold, that it has distracted me from the significant and wondrous amount of snow covering my world. I hate to be cold, but I love snow.
I love the quiet clean of a snow-laden street at night. I love the black and white of trees and snow in shadow. I love the smell and the sparkle.

To me, snow is the physical manifestation of the sense of rest and renewal I feel in the winter months.

Thursday 7:48 pm
I am also reading a book entitled Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Orhan, born in Istanbul in 1959, has been under Turkish and Islamic criticism for his writing, although he claims to not really be interested in Politics. Snow, published in 2002, is set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey and tells the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists.
For me, Snow is more about religion and spiritualism then about politics. It seems to be about the human search for identity and meaning. In the book, the main character, an atheist poet name Ka, is struggling with his own views of religion and his place in the universe. It is the snow that continues to fall and cover his home town that continues to stimulate in him some concept of god or spirit. When I see snow, I think of God, he responds throughout the book to various individuals who question him of his faith. It is the only response he uses, as though he does not know what he believes but he cannot deny the absolute perfection and divinity in snow.

As an agnostic struggling with my own spirituality, or at least in defining it, I am drawn to his words. And I am drawn to snow.