The snow
posted by Riika on 18 May 2013

I came to these parts first in March, taking part in a workshop that combined the biology of snow with the arctic experience. Everything was shiny and blue then. Although not only blue as we were later to notice. The snow in its whiteness did show all the colours, the warmth of a purple and the yellows so pale and yet so strong and a brownish cream white that cannot be described since it is almost only to be felt with the entire body. I thought then in advance much about the phases of the snow. How it develops in the air, floats down and joins with other snow, becomes snowdrift and starts a slower change, becomes denser, heavier, more concentrated for then to become ice. Or the forming into ice of water, its flexibility, the moving of it. But there were at that time not so much of these processes visible, even though we saw all kinds of weathers. The changeable nature of the snow hid itself in the silence and smoothness of the all-covering snow blanket. The snow was solid and firm. I was, and my thoughts were, moving on the outer shell of the snow, the snow cover took my gaze and made it glide on the slopes until the furthest point. Well, now it is changing and it is different. When I came almost two weeks ago, the silence was still there and the snow was still there. But there was something else as well, a softness about everything and yet a delicate sharpness that expressed itself in the emerging black patches on the white or the sound of the snow on the lake’s ice that I skied on. I was starting to look closer and I also had to, because moving around requires more effort now. After there has been days with a lot of moist in the air, some of it also coming down. The fog reveals and hides the landscape in a sudden way that seems unlike to fogs nature, since it feels quite heavy and slow. I’m wrapped in the fog, this time sensing the air bordering the room around me. The landscape-views in the fog make me feel as if I were in an ink-painting, in which the mountains look like they were two-dimensional layers one behind another, like flat scenes. Yesterday I still started with the skis and up on the highland it went well enough, although I was occasionally reaching quite far in the depths of the turquoise crypt of the snow. That is when I was going off-track. Consequently I start to listen to the snow (as if to detect it’s consistence) and start to hear: there is waters flowing, invisible, not underneath but up above me, everywhere, somewhere. This is different. One other day last week I was also listening, to the snow itself. It had a faint but precise sound, it was melting but not yet becoming water, it was a sound of a metamorphosis. Now it is the braking of water. On the way down, still yesterday, I ski into the garden of streams. Suddenly it is a whole symphony that I’m in. Waters flow everywhere and I ski on it. I also ski, gently, on the ground and plants, for snow has disappeared. Proceeding downwards I enter and exit in the more silent spheres of the presence of the “woods” - the birds, the smell of the brush, the sound of the birches -, and in the more or less enormous volumes of the water sounds. The phase changing of the snow reveals itself now and it does it the other way around. I think about the ice age, the powers of the waters, the ice, the movements, the formation of formations and the events of appearance and disappearance in the landscape.