The crystalline nature of snow is best seen at daybreak, when minuscule sparkles of color peek in and out over the newly smoothed landscape. After landing, each snowflake is a transitory diamond, a reflection of pure crystalline order, but only until the temperature tears it quietly apart. There's an inherent, tragic beauty in this brevity. A good snowscape is visually unfamiliar - it makes you see your home, roads or terrain differently, as if anew. A snowscape is cleansed of the base earthiness of the seasons before and replaced with almost pristine order and divine serenity.
Snow is forgiveness.
I see little redeemable in this world. Whether it's the petty and vicious cruelties we save for the people closest to us or the mind-numbing statistics of evil and injustice en masse, my eyes are instantly drawn to humanity's errors made not once but constantly and simultaneously. Crimes to each other, to our world, or even to ourselves have tried my spirit to the point where the spark of forgiveness is, in me, at best a memory, at worst a delusion. But what I see in snow is infinitely more than I am capable of. I see forgiveness.