Snowbound, Walking

Madison snows heavily Saturday and I walked.

There were some rumblings of an excursion to the south side (via the car/coffin), and that was eventually scrapped because the coffin aspect of the car emerged with greater prominence as the evening wore on and the snow accumulated.

Instead, I went for a walk. This was not the kind of walk without destination. This was not the kind of walk for walking's sake. This was a travel, a journey, a quest across the Isthmus to the east side from where I live downtown to meet and greet (an activity Madisonians are oddly prone to in blizzards.

The walk was a purposive spatial flow contained by the fluff and comfort of a blizzard. The containment of the snow storm has been perplexing me since that Saturday night. Somehow, in sub-freezing temperatures, the most compelling way to travel was by foot. The snow did that thing where it falls and enchants my mind with each descending inch as it lightly and then convincingly alights the ground and merges with previous generations of flakes.

The visual field of the snowstorm was luscious. It engendered the feeling of a hug wrapping its long wintering arms around me. It was not just the snow, though. It is only in tandem with my human presence, bundled warmly and dryly against the snow but also with the snow that I was comforted by the snow. The embrace of the blizzard was in the relationship of my loving mind, mystified by beauty, and the mass of the snowfall surrounding me completely.

The snow not only demanded a stop to my machine mediated movement, it called me out of my home into it to be within its oceanic density.