Painting Pictures with Words

09 Dec Painting Pictures with Words

Posted at 23:57h in Newsletter, Uncategorized by Karena de Souza 0 Comments

Vibrant orange with electric purple. That is the colour of my sky as the winter sun sets. It ignites the white rooftops, setting them gently ablaze like the dying embers in a fire. The inky dark clouds on the horizon pick up the orange and turn it purple in a way that I only see in the depths of a Canadian winter.

But it wasn’t that way this morning. I host a weekly Write Now session, where other writers gather with me, and we write alongside each other, in silence, for an hour. I take the call from my standing desk. And today, it was a very interesting view.

It has been snowing all day, powder-fine granules drifting down from the sky. Not much of it. But incessant.

That’s not the surprise – this isn’t our first snowfall of the season. I could tell that more snow was on the way. I just knew it. As I walked to the library last evening, the sky held that grey woolly heaviness. My Dad would always point it out to me as I was growing up in London. I am rummaging through my mind to retrieve the phrase he would use to describe it. The words are lost in the fleecy colour of the skies. Ah, yes. “Look. The sky is heavy with snow.”

So. Back to the sky. It could be that I don’t often stand and stare out onto the horizon on a snowy day. On most wintery days I am more often focused on my driving, staring at the wall behind my computer screen, or wrapped up warm under a blanket reading a book. But the standing desk by my window is a fresh 2021 experience.

I feel like I’ve stepped into one of my sister’s beautiful water-colour sketches of a winter scene. The ground is blanketed in drifts of white. Three deep green conifers stand to the right of the frame, their feathery branches sprinkled with just enough sparkle to make them look frosted. A splattering of chimney stacks stand out like stark black punctuation marks on the white roofs of the neighbouring homes, the only other colour being that characteristic orangey red of the brick. All the maple trees have now lost their leaves, and you can finally see the charcoal black spinal structures that supported those glorious yellows and oranges and reds just a few weeks ago.

The mulberry tree lost all its leaves one windy day in November. All that is left are a visible spindly chalky grey-brown confusion of twigs. Suddenly, there on the highest branch, I see our resident red cardinal flit in to take his rest, bringing a tiny dash of red to the dreary.

But it is something about the sky that has captured my attention. There is none. Not a hint of palest blue peeking between the clouds. Or the ugly grey that normally hovers at ground level. Not even a weak winter sun. I feel like I am looking at a painting on a pure white sheet of paper. I turn my zoom camera towards the window to share this unusual scene with my writing group. I wish I had taken a photo.

Painting with words

Then it struck me. I could still share the scene with you. Michael Dean asked the group this week if a scene could be all the better for not being visual. Can we communicate the setting with words? Hence this post.

My little exercise left me with these past, present, future questions:

What might our world look like without a blue sky? I’m currently watching Star Trek Discovery. I love that show. And one of the things I notice is the environment on and around each planet. The designers are so creative and imaginative. So today I got to wondering – what would this world look like without a sky?
Have I passed along that simple ancient wisdom of reading the sky that my Dad passed to me? “Just look up.”
Would I have noticed the cardinal‘s brief visit if I had taken a photo? Or was it because I was trying to fix all the details in my mind’s eye? How often do I go back and look at all the detail in the photos I capture on my phone? How can I stay “in the moment”?

I’m sure you have your own set of questions. Care to share?

Soon darkness will encompass us, shrink-wrapping our few daylight hours tighter and tighter as we approach the winter solstice. In the past few evenings, there has been a new moon – a hangnail moon my god-daughter calls it. Its position is really interesting. It seems to be hanging off the brightest star in the sky. It was spectacular and noticeable – and my husband stopped by my desk to point it out to me. Could this be the inspiration for a pendant? A bright diamond with a crescent moon suspended by an imaginary thread a few inches below?

Today’s transition from white to night has been another gift from nature. I savour it. And share it with you.