What I find Beautiful
By: Ariana Torres
Tags: Reflections, Snow, Beauty, Nature

It is high noon, yet the sky is dark, clouded and the atmosphere is flooded with an eery energy. The ground, and everything that kept still overnight, is once again buried deep underneath a soft, delicate, and powdery blanket of white, pure snow.

How Mother Nature has no difficulty decorating the earth’s absolute surface with a blanket so perfectly placed that it feels like a sin to disturb it. The pure whiteness covering the ground and trees seems to illuminate the grey day with its vibrancy. I stare at it, lost in awe at how peaceful it looks. But I painfully come to discover that my human eyes are too weak for it’s radiancy and I have to look away.

I continue the task at hand: shoveling the snow from the driveway. I am coated and covered from head to toe because the coldness is absolutely impossible to combat unprotected for a simple being. Suddenly, I feel coldness begin to creep through my body from the bottom of my feet. My sock is progressively becoming heavier, colder and wetter. I look down. I have turned the delicate white powder into a muddy, filthy, and condensed ice. It’s undeniably my doing, for the imprint of the soles of my own boots are exposed atop the, now unrecognizable, snow.

Then, a rustling whistle in the distance is heard. My family and I turn east for a split second, but then it stops and they continue to shovel away. I proceed to stare, trying to maneuver my sight to see what lies beyond the great wall of fog that Mother Nature had created. The whistle is heard again, but at a lower octave. It sounds as if the wind is also trying to maneuver its way through the dense forest, but in comparison to my vision, its force is penetrating flawlessly. Suddenly, the sky darkens to a deeper shade of grey and the fog marches through the forest towards us. The deep whistling, whirring sound is no longer in the distance: it’s engulfing us. I hear my family yelling, shocked by the force of the wind that has thrown them off balance. I try to see what is happening but I can no longer hear them, I can no longer see anything, I can no longer move, and I can no longer find it within myself to fight back, so I stand still. At that moment, pure whiteness covers me. I find myself warming up to the idea that I am worthy as a human being to be utterly in harmony with a force that extends beyond any man made technology. That for once I feel at peace in the middle of all chaos simply because I refused to resist. My eyes no longer felt the need to look away and the striking coldness I once felt, dissolved. I am honored to be in the presence of such raw purity, such pronounced power, and such delicate gracefulness, but, what seemed like decades later, it was gone. The only evidence of such an event was found on our perplexed faces and flakes of snow delicately embedded into our hair.

Since that day, however, I have never been caught in the middle of such an event ever again, but my relationship with the beauty of snow and the power of Mother Nature has only grown immensely. Whenever I am in contact with snow, I understand that I am able to admire it as I displace it from where nature chose because in a few effortless minutes, the entire ground can be covered once again. Additionally, I came to realize that after nature creates multiple replicas of the delicate blanket of snow in the area, it must travel to bring the phenomenon to another place in the world. At this time, I begin to reflect on the force Mother Nature carries within herself and how it is absolutely prepossessing. We, as humans, are not able to see the force unless it comes in contact with a physical object: only then do we become aware of the beautiful craftsmanship and awe striking events nature creates. Unfortunately, such a force is commonly labeled as a “natural disaster” and an “unsafe condition”, causing fear and hatred to become emotions humans immediately associate it with. Only when a person is able to stop and embrace the fact that they can not win in a fight against the force of nature, can they come to see the beauty within it. Now the beauty a person finds as a result of halting resistance can be found within the immediate event caused by force itself or the impassioned humanity that rises after hundreds have suffered.

When I recall the event I experienced that day, I feel like I relive it every time. Of course it is not merely as intense as it was the first time, but the perspective I gained from it will never cease to exist, only expand. Nor will I ever forget that when all chaos and destruction seems to become overpowering, only a human has the ability to stop, embrace and experience the beauty that was initially disguised.