snow is shit

 

We cannot know the future, but remembering the past with care and accuracy equips us to navigate it.

Rebecca Solnit 

not my snowman

 

It's been a tough week, winter doesn't help matters at all. I don't care about the brilliant intensity of the sunshine on snow and however blue the sky is to some when the ground is crunching and slippery with refrozen slush and also it's too damn cold. On the worst day, I had an early appointment with the regular experts and after carefully following the predictions of the weather app, I had concluded that it would be ok to cycle there provided I wrap up and put on the reflecting gear as it involved starting before sunrise. Well, the weather app, in fact all the weather apps, got it wrong and I woke up to roads frozen solid after a rainy night. To add some excitement, snow was starting to fall. In this part of Germany, this kind of weather always comes as a complete surprise to the road traffic departments with predictable results. My initial reaction was to just stay home but after much deliberating, I remembered the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism which emphatically state time and again that we must accept another’s generosity otherwise we are interfering with their ability to generate good karma. With that thought, I joyfully accepted R's offer to drive us there, knowing that he simply loves a challenge. (This is a man who in his younger days drove a dilapidated Austin Minor across East Africa.) Let's just say, he had fun. And after he spent an interesting morning sampling the various coffee options on campus until I had been told what I knew they would tell me, we crawled back home on the icy roads.

 

Apart from that, things could only get worse better, and so they have. As the saying goes, modern day fascism is not shouting: Look here, it's me, fascism. Modern day fascism grins and says:  Come on, it's freedom of speech.

Modern day fascism wants you to think that it's the new, fresh way of understanding the world and the people who still insist on issues of justice and human rights are just yesterday's fluffy goody-goody bores who haven't heard the shot. We have a general election in eight weeks and it looks grim.

All I can come up with that I need to stand sturdy, holding onto my morals and my humanity, to live as I feel we should be living, to remain defiant. To not go into internal emigration. To be aware that in a dictatorship, you are not allowed to tell what you see, you are not allowed to say what you think and you are not allowed to write what you want.

Open our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be.
We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope - the necessary driver of change - to inspire us to action.
Hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still. We understand that our demoralisation becomes the most serious impediment to bettering the world. In its active form, hope is a supreme gesture of love, a radical and audacious duty, whereas despair is a stagnant rejection of life itself. Hope becomes the energy of change.

Nick Cave

Spring cannot come soon enough.