phenomenology of nature – Northcoast Antiquarian

Westbound on Detroit Road,
Thursday afternoon—
the sun at last undoing
what the week of hard cold had locked,
wind finding purchase
in limbs long held numb.

At the light, I was made still
beneath the oaks that rise above the church,
their upper branches clearing the roofline,
where dozens—perhaps hundreds—
of narrow arms were lifted,
bending back, then forward again,

not in time,
not together,
yet not alone—
each answering the wind
along its own brief arc.

I searched for the word:
rhythmic—too orderly;
swaying—too mild;
dancing—too deliberate.

No.
This was something else.

An ecstatic murmuring—
as of congregants when a current passes through them,
not taught, not rehearsed,
each moved according to its measure,
yet taken up into one trembling praise
of what simply is.

The light changed.
The branches did not stop.

Icy stars—
points of ancient fire made brittle by distance,
as though the heavens themselves had entered winter.
They do not blaze; they prick.
They hang, hard and lucid, in a silence sharpened by cold.

Such stars feel less like promises than reckonings.
Their light arrives stripped of warmth,
having crossed immensities where heat was spent long ago.
What reaches the eye is endurance, not comfort—
illumination without mercy.

In winter they seem closer,
because the air has been scoured clean of softness.
Each star stands alone, exact, unblurred,
the sky insisting on precision,
on the refusal of haze, metaphor, or excuse.

Indeed—stars resemble snowflakes.
Each one discrete,
each one sharp with its own geometry,
no two quite alike,
yet all governed by the same severe order.

They fall not downward but inward,
settling upon the mind rather than the ground.
They do not melt; they persist.
What snow does to the earth—
muting, clarifying, equalizing—
stars do to thought.

Yet they are dissimilar in temperament—decisively so.
The star, for all its pinprick stillness to the eye,
is violence without pause:
fusion, a steady hammer at its core,
plasma boiling and convecting within its bounds,
only to be held together by gravity’s unrelenting fist.
Its light is not calm but coerced—
order wrested from perpetual revolt.

The snowflake, by contrast, is obedience incarnate.
It forms in surrender to temperature, pressure, and time,
each facet answering silently to law.
Nothing churns; nothing rebels.
Structure blooms where energy dissipates,
an architecture born not of struggle but of yielding.

And yet—what appears as opposition resolves into fidelity:
both answering to temperature, to nature, to law.

Not submission,
but staying true
to what is given,
to what may not be otherwise.

The star obeys by burning.
Given mass and pressure, it cannot do otherwise.
Fusion is not choice but consequence,
law pressed hard upon matter
until light is forced into being.
Its turbulence is not rebellion
but endurance under extremes.

The snowflake obeys by forming.
Lowered heat, suspended vapor,
the slightest allowance of stillness—
and geometry appears.
No facet decides;
each angle arrives as it must.

Thus neither star nor snowflake is free,
and yet both are exact.
They do not err,
because they do not aspire.
They enact what must be—
and leave us to consider
what it means to call that perfection.