The Language of Snow

They say Snow was not weather, but cleansing.
It was the sky releasing what we pressed into it over the long, restless year.
Every word we speak rises. A kindness warms the air. A curse chills it.
Truth and falsehood carry different weights.
The sky gathers everything, fury, softness, petty mutterings, quiet mercies. And stores it the way frost stores light.
When the year thins and the lanterns burn low, the sky exhales.
Snow settles back to earth, shaped by what we gave it.
Some winters bite.
Some soften.
Most simply show the character of the year we cast upwards.

To those who walk between thresholds, snow is a crossroads in falling light.
A pause where the world's hidden patterns become visible.
Snow is not silence.
Snow is not cold.
It is the year exhaled.

A whispered blessing travels differently from a muttered insult. Both rise into the unseen corridors of the sky. Nothing spoken truly disappears.
Over the months the air grows heavy with our rising breaths, soft words, careless words, hopeful words. When winter comes, the sky loosens its grip. The accumulated charge drifts downward, cooling, crystallising, into the strange geometry of snowfall.
I have walked beneath gentle falls that felt like soft hours settling around me. I have felt flakes sting like tiny needles after sharper days. A gentle year forms wide, slow flakes that cling to bare branches as though they belonged there all along. A fractured year brings hard, fast-falling snow. A year of grief arrives heavy and muffling. A year of quiet blessings drifts down as fine, untroubled powder. I have watched snow fall in perfect silence after months of conflict in a household, flakes drifting reluctantly, as if the sky needed more time to unravel the tangles.
I have seen sudden bursts follow a single spoken truth.
I have stood in delicate falls that seemed to hold the air itself in tenderness.
Snowfall deepens the pause of winter. It slows the eye. softens the ground. Replaces familiar lines with new ones. The past becomes visible in flakes that melt on the sleeve.
The future lingers in the cold not yet formed.
We stand between what was cast outward and what might be gathered inward.
Every fall of snow is a moment when memory settles and patterns emerge, when the distance between past and possibility feels thin.
The old folk said snow teaches patience. I think it teaches something quieter, the difference between what must be carried and what can be set down.
In falling light we see our own path more plainly.
A winter wytch learns to read snowfall the way others read faces. Each fall carries its own tone, tender hush, sharp strike, uncertain drift. She notices small shifts, how snow thickens at the edge of a conversation, how a flurry arrives with a truth spoken aloud, how the world seems to inhale when a secret is released. Walking beneath falling snow, she asks only what she has been unwilling to acknowledge.
The snow does not speak, yet it reveals where tension gathered, where softness took root, where a single breath was heavier than realised.
Winter holds until the world is ready to move again. The thaw comes when the sky has released enough of its burden.
As snow sinks into the earth, sharp edges blur, softness deepens into soil. Patterns dissolve into water and carry their stories into roots and rivers. The frozen breath of the year groundward, unattached to its old form, available again. I have stood in melting fields where the last snow clung only to shadows the sun had not reached.
People are much the same. Some things thaw quickly. Others linger in corners. Everything changes once warmth returns.
The sky will gather our breath again.
It will hold it for another year.
It will release it when the lanterns burn low.
And once more the world will offer us the chance to see ourselves clearly in falling light.

~ Liadán Hallow