Gazing down from my window early in the evening at the end of March I see islands of grey ice. They are separated by mirror-like channels reflecting the last sheen of daylight. Above them a skein of ducks arrows toward the horizon, their streamlined bodies catching the last rays from a setting sun. And when that star sinks the final degree below the horizon, it bounces an encore of light off the clouds onto the lake. I cannot decipher what happens next, except that the archipelago of ice and water refract rainbows and distill them into corals and pinks as if in gentle gratitude. This is magic.

I watch the light dwindle and dance until the Cyclopean sun closes its eyelid for the last time. Then I venture out on the ghost-lit ski trails nearby where, fed by a pecking order of stars, a new light awakens in all its conjugations. Like bits of glass the stars vitrify and spangle across the firmament. It is quite bright when my eyes adjust, and the snow beneath my skis chatters with applause. But all around me the naked forest listens in shocked silence, as if I have burst into its private boudoir.

Nudes to the left of me, nudes to the right. They kept me awake all through winter’s sleep, and they warmed me with dreams, because dream magic knows no sleep. Nature poses nude because it is the only honest thing to do when the last rags of autumn have fallen. By contrast, nature seduces by getting dressed when spring cues up her music. We’ve sounded her drum roll now – winter to spring – and in the words of an old rock ‘n’ roll classic, “I’m like a one-eyed cat, peeping in a seafood store.” But before I open the next season’s door on gentle zephyrs and red, red roses, allow me a last fleeting image from winter that carries a point I made on Facebook the first day of spring:

Today I had a premonition. Pausing on an overlook above a ski trail at 5AM, I saw another skier approaching through the dawn mist. He was only a distant silhouette, and I see dozens of such figures each time I ski, but I knew he was the one. Some months ago, at that very switchback on the trail, we had met for the first and only time. There was something in the air between us even then that led to his confiding in me almost within the first minute that he had received a cancer indicator months earlier, had forgone surgery in favor of extremely positive lifestyle and outlook changes of his own design, and that this very day he would receive test results to see where things stood. We had a remarkable conversation, but I hadn’t thought of that for some time…until this moment.

I simply knew who it was approaching through the mist, and I waited. When he made the switchback turn and stood beside me, he stopped. He knew too and he said my name. I said his and immediately asked him about his test results. He was, if not cured, well on the way to a clean reversal of the markers. I’d call it miraculous, except that in the wake of our astonishing second conversation I’ve had time to reflect that maybe it isn’t miraculous at all. Maybe this is just how it should be for a species driven by the power of its brains, its beliefs and expectations, and its primacy based on adaptability and resilience and the will to override negative interpretations or crippling self-pity.

I see so much needless suffering in the minds of human beings, particularly in America. Depression, anxiety, fear, induced low self-esteem, a socially inflicted conviction that one is damaged goods, fatalistic acceptance of medical pronouncements, vague beliefs that one is unalterably crippled by historical events centuries removed and buried under a dozen disconnected generations – the list itself becomes the affliction.

And yet the evidence is all around us that our species thrives on the power of belief and positive thinking. Things that are devastating to individuals in our society would barely penetrate the consciousness of humans in ages past. Our modern demons are not the lion launching from the bush and much less the minute-by-minute tests of physical strength and endurance required by the nomadic living that honed our capacities over millennia. Yes, physical threats are still there, abstract or not, but our demons now are much more psychological. And those arise not from the perceptions of our senses but from the way society thinks as a whole. The opinions, trends and shifting dictates of our institutions and cultures dominate our list of fears. Neuroses or paranoia of one sort or another shape our well-being just as they define our dysfunction. We ride high when it seems everyone loves us or glorifies what we do. And we shrivel under public shame or condemnation when the worm turns. We become self-fulfilling prophecies of negative expectations. This is more complex than the physical threats of old, more stealthy than the lion in the bush. We are told when to become victims, pitied into hopeless impotency, and we can be easily stoked to blind outrage or branded with one-size-fits-all rationalizations that ensure failure no matter what we attempt.

Can you see what a misty figure coming out of the dawn on a ski trail as if from the mists of ages past says in my world? The “premonition” I had feels less spooky now as I sit in the embrace of comfort and technology. There is balance in the multiple theaters of my life, and maybe a little perspective. Getting in touch with old instincts and realities is very grounding on a small blue planet somewhere in the universe. Today is its vernal equinox, tonight is its full moon, and I shall share the tides of both.

Photos below close out this Sullygram, including: a couple of rosy photos of sunset on the lake behind my house, a couple of yours truly; and the rest are from Elm Creek, one of the Three Rivers parks and the second largest municipal nature conservatory in the country at 5,600 acres.   

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan