When winter comes, it brings strange beauty. The world is stripped back to essence and element. The trees are made naked, the contours of the earth revealed under the thin, faded grass. Winter is a countryside reduced to black and white and grey. In the minimalism of winter, the pure art of nature is rendered visible; the plain architecture of the trees, the mineral hardness of the stars, the recurring geometry of wave ridges on the surface of open water.
Desolation is its own beauty, as is the sound of silence. The insects, like the birds, are dumbed; no grasshoppers rasp in the meadow, no wasps buzz around the orchard. And when there is sound in winter, it rings individual and eternal: the wailing of the vixen, the moaning wind,…
