Where Words Land

In my home, snow clouds on the horizon always make me rush for my coat. I have always loved the snow. There is something about those first flakes that makes me want to be outside beneath them, watching them fall.

Somewhere along the way though, I started thinking about their shape. No two snowflakes are quite the same, and I wondered, what if there was more to that than weather? What if snow carried something of the year with it?

Not a punishment nor a blessing, just a release of something too heavy to hold.

Words carry power. The whispers of grief, the feral yelling into the wind and the laughter under the sun all carry their own weight, exhaled into the world through ways we choose to give them meaning.  Do kind words warm the current? Does a curse truly chill?

The sky becomes a collector of breaths with meaning attached.

As the wheel turns, it’s the sky’s turn to exhale. When winter comes, the sky could be beginning its own cleansing.

The accumulated charge drifts downwards, crystallising into the strange geometry of snowfall, what was once held settles back to Earth as snow, neutral in itself, stripped of our intention, yet shaped by it just the same. It takes no sides, it just holds the charge we give it. The wielder is the nuance. Energy is not moral. What we do with it can be.

Some winters bite more than usual, some pass by in a flurry, I find comfort in its predictability. Perhaps snow can be understood as a crossroads in fading light. A stillness in which the patterns we have followed become visible.

 What if it’s the release of unspent energy? The sky returning our breath back to us, just in another form.

Do we believe our words just fall away once spoken? Does anything spoken truly disappear?

Perhaps words land somewhere. Snow creates a strange suspension in time, like walking into an old building where everything has been covered in sheets, erasing the usual edges until the familiar becomes strange. Snow does much the same. It covers the mess and chaos without making any of it disappear. For a liminal moment, everything looks different.

How can snow be silent if every falling flake is something finding somewhere to land?

Then comes the thaw. Snow melts, the edges return and what was covered becomes visible again. But if snow carries the weight of our words, what happens when it becomes water?

Words and their meanings melt into emotion. What was spoken has already landed, but perhaps its weight carries on in another form. Emotions become reactions, reactions become patterns, and patterns have a habit of finding their way around the wheel again.

Not everything changes simply because its form does.

Maybe nothing spoken truly disappears. It just becomes something else.

 Liadán Hallow