Click HERE to listen. Ride the downward course of a snowflake’s plunge, and you’ll see the signs he knows to read. The wind leaves its signature in the powdery arabesques of blown-snow sculptures like the dunes of any Arabian desert. Outcrops of rock litter the upward-faces of one glacier, another, or another, where each of them flows toward confluence or away from it, at a speed only a rock might know. The glaciers themselves—as old as the world he recognizes—trample unseen things far, far beneath them as the surface of each melts and freezes in accordance to the whims of weather. Clouds mask the dome of open sky on occasion, stealing the non-color of snow, or the hues of seal pups, darkening into adulthood. The sun, in its polar circuit, rises in the east, sets in the west, and rolls like a child’s ball, across the northern horizon. Or, by winter’s decree, never truly rises at all. Light and darkness in endless stretches are how he knows the presence of time. There are no roads in his world, none of any substantial permanence. There no blossoms, and were you to speak of such things to him, he’d laugh (with mouth closed, so as to conserve the body’s warmth.) The songs he knows are rich with all of snow’s ancient names. And he knows them All of them. His name is Nhahatl, and he has a story but he has yet to tell it. * * * Images feed my muse and the text above was inspired by my one photograph of Chicago’s blizzard of 2010. It is the only picture I have of that meteorological beastie. It's not even a photo of the blizzard itself, so much as the aftermath. As a photograph, it’s exceptionally deceptive. The snow in drifting sheets and jagged, mountainous up-thrusts is little more than…well…snow in Chicago. Because of the dynamics of the previous night’s storm, there were drifts and the snow pictured here was scant in depth. (Because of the magic of cameras, it actually looks impressive.) Music feeds my Muse as well: though perhaps it’s reasonable to say that my muse is music. There is—after all—a particular tonality to its voice. It is no surprise, then, that I might also find inspiration on a composition by Arvo Pärt. I’d first heard his composition, “Tabula Rasa” while attending to some half-pleasant task. I’d known his music for quite some time, but the composition playing (on one of Chicago’s public broadcasting television channels) was unlike the more liturgy-inspired music I’d grown accustomed to in my younger years. Today, I played with random syllables in my mind, listened to now-familiar music, and rifled through files, until finding an image of snow. At first, I’d thought of mountains, standing in a kind of ridge, echoing the backbone of the world. And then, I imagined something else…the glimmerings of a story. Music and image conspired to create text, but the text as it arose, refused to grow into anything more than a fragment. There may be more to Nhahatl’s untold story, later…but for now, there is snow…and the sound of spare, evocative music. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great week.