Your prompt for this week is:
Frost
So far this month, in my little corner of the West Sussex coast, we’ve had snow, sun, howling wind, lots of rain, and, now, more sunshine. Temperatures have dipped to -4 degrees Celsius, and yesterday they were up to 13 degrees. Climate change, of course, has a lot to answer for, and watching the weather bounce around erratically makes me increasingly more panicked about what I can do to help our ailing planet. I feel so helpless in the face of governments and huge corporations who prioritise short-term profits over the long-term existence of any people to generate any kind of profit at all (but what do they care - they’ll be dead by then).
In the face of any large scale crisis - and our world isn’t short of those right now - all we can ever do is focus on what we can control, and let go of what we can’t. We can make the most positive choices available to us, we can put pressure on businesses and world leaders to give us more, better ones, and we can teach the next generation to be better than those that came before them.
We can also do more to notice. Being aware of the natural world around us, paying attention to the changing seasons, learning about the plants and trees and animals, and about the cycles taking place under our noses, and about our place in those… allowing ourselves to fall in love with our planet, and teaching others to love it too - that’s the best chance we have of saving it.
One of the big signs of winter that my children notice is frost. Living right next to the sea, we don’t get much in the way of snow. Any that does flutter from the sky is unable to settle on the ground. So frost, sparkling like diamonds on window panes, on parked cars, on the pavement as we walk along, is as exciting as it gets for them. And they do get so very excited about it. It’s something that seems so mundane, and even irritating, to us adults - it’s the reason I have to remember to start getting the car ready 10 minutes before I need to leave (or the reason I’ll be 10 minutes late); it makes the roads and the paths slippery and hazardous; it kills off plants and damages pipes. But seeing it through a child’s eyes has completely transformed it for me. Suddenly, I see a world covered in silver glitter, I feel the tingle of anticipation of Yule and the Winter Solstice and Christmas (all very much mixed into one in my household), and I relish the chill that tells me that the wheel of the year has turned again and nature’s cycles are showing us something new to connect with.
But when we don’t only use the world “frost” to talk about the weather.
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