“The pleasure and pain endured to purify our mystic ways and magnify our crystal days.”
The past few days have convinced me that I can withstand the difficulties of winter here, in part because of the extraordinary beauties I witness every day. Not a day goes by without my saying “Wow.” The Catskills have provided plenty of that in the past six months – the three-inch hail, the house getting struck by lightning, watching trees fall to the ground unexpectedly on clear windless days (they do make a sound, by the way, but then again, someone was there to hear them), the bear cubs wandering around my woodpile, the hummingbirds buzzing around my bee-balms. But winter outdoes them all. No season has such a capacity for changing the landscape and making all things new. Yesterday when driving to New Paltz I found the mountaintops glowing in the sunlight – at the higher elevations, Friday’s rain had frozen on the branches, making the entire forest appear made of crystal. The road climbed right through the crystal forest, and I got out and wandered around in sheer wonder. I wish I didn’t have such a terribly lousy camera. Something like this happens every day. The photo below is terribly overexposed, but it does show the general phenomenon. It looked like the New Jerusalem descending. 
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