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My morning alarm buzzes and I slowly pull off the covers, dreading the cold which awaits. I climb down from the top bunk, careful to not wake my slumbering roommate. Lucky for her, she does not have class until noon. I on the other hand have less than 30 minutes to shower, dress, grab breakfast, and take the 20 minute walk to campus. Sometimes I regret buying an alarm clock with a snooze button; I should have been up an hour ago.
I make my way to the window to pull back the drapes and allow a little light into the room. I stop and gasp for air. For a moment, I just stand in front of the frosty glass; I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I can only stare.
I quickly realize that while I slept, something amazingly beautiful happened. What I see on this day captures my attention and grips my soul in a way I have never felt before.
I run to my closet and throw on my clothes, layer after layer. There is no time to shower, breakfast can wait. I run down the stairs, skipping steps here and there. I feel like a child on Christmas morning; The anticipation is murder.
I push the double-doors open and step outside, eyes wide and a sense of urgency running throughout my veins. I stand in awe, my head raised toward the morning sky.
Somewhere during the middle of the night, the city turned white, pure, and clean again. And now, snowflakes are falling; Real snowflakes.
I can’t help but giggle out loud. I watch as the flakes jiggle and jive a bit and then stand still for a moment as if they were taking a breath, a sigh of relief. They float carelessly, light and free, quite playfully actually. Nature is screaming its head off with all the fury and frenzy imaginable, with all the pomp and circumstance of a snowstorm graduating into a blizzard, and these snowflakes just pause and flutter silently. Then they fall downward, onto my forehead, cheeks, and eyelashes.
I blink, and the small flakes melt into my skin, becoming a part of me. Some people call this nature, but I call it a blessing.
Like many college students, I have had my share of questions and doubts over the last few years regarding faith, spirituality, and ultimately, God. I am not one of those people who believe that the Bible is the absolute truth. In my opinion, there are too many contradictions in it.
Nevertheless, I do believe that there is a greater power out there than anything anyone of us could ever fully comprehend. And every once and a while, we are blessed with a better understanding of this power. There are wonderful moments, signs even, that are there if only we take the time to pay attention to the beauty of life around us.
I close my eyes for a minute. The cold is inching its way to my skin and I know that I will need to start moving in a few minutes or risk the chance of becoming a icicle. But for a moment, I just stand there and take it all in.
No matter how ugly the blizzard shows its face, no matter how many times the gust will knock me down on my way to class this morning, right now I can only feel a sense of inner peace.
I can’t imagine how much I have missed because I was too caught up in the blizzard of the world around me. The times I forgot to stop, to look, and to listen. The times I inevitably missed the pure joy and compassion of life which makes life worth living: An old man giving up his seat on the bus for an old woman, a stranger dropping the first coin into the empty cup of a disheveled homeless man, a secret smile of someone enjoying the weather, snowflakes dancing in the air … well, perhaps not today.
Some people may see the first snow of the winter season as merely an act of nature. But as I stand here, surrounded in a cloud of whiteness and surely to be late to class, I see it as a sign. A sign that there is a greater power out there, and when we are looking, shows us the reason to believe. It reminds us that we are light and free, and don’t have to buried beneath the snow banks of the storm no matter how terribly the blizzard may seem.
So for right now, I can’t help but pause, watch and thank whoever may be listening.
From across the ocean,
Jessica
