How to Pay Attention This Week

The frost on the landscape shifts the color palette for a brief yet important moment

These cold days before the snow comes and blankets our lives, the mornings are best known for their light layer of frost that prepares the ground for the incoming wintery days. The tension between the endings of all in nature and the full blanket of winter is evident with each frosty morning now that it takes longer for the earth to feel the warmth of the sunlight later and later every day.

In color theory, white is added to a color to change the tint and create pastel colors. On mornings like these, when the frost layers on the entire landscape, this is exactly what happens. Every tone of color becomes muted and lowered to a perfect painting in beautiful pastel tints, which shifts the perspective on the places we see and come to know through all seasons because of the routines of our lives. As the frost paints new colors to the landscape, it also prepares and acts as a precursor to the snow that will follow shortly. I find the frost to be a gift to show me how subtly everything changes and the beauty within it all.

I love watching as the sun hits the frosted tops of the grasses and the milkweed or the sumac’s fruit. Every crystal is unique, perfect, and like a glittering reflective world all its own. It is one of many moments that make me believe that magic exists.

On these frosty mornings that are so temporary, I want to be there in the wild fields and valleys around me that I walk every day and I have watched fade and come back to life over the years. I want to be there as the sun rises over the trees to the southeast. I want to be amongst the hills when the first rays hit the frosted landscape and shines like diamonds just before it melts away to dew and rises in the heat of the sun’s rays into the air, making small rainbows if you watch closely. In that brief moment of time, I feel I am watching something important happen. I am witnessing just how important it is to be present and aware of these changes around us in nature and self. Most of all, I am being reminded there is beauty even in the shorter days of the year despite the flower’s life ending and the bounty of the garden long past.

There is much to learn and hear amongst the frosted landscape where the sunlight carves a path in the crystals as they melt, yet the ground remains hard. There is something powerful to witness on a cold November morning. Something is usually spoken in these moments if we are willing to head out and pay attention.

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