Let’s make believe that these year-beginning days of fog were like a theatre play featuring our new year with the stage curtains closed. Undrawn, closing off our view as far as one can see; mere feet in some cases, a curtain of grayness extending to places unseen. As Jaimal Yogis writes in his book of self discovery, “Saltwater Buddha,” “There is this sly strip of fog ­— water in it’s most mystical incarnation — slithering over, around, and through the hills, making everything look ancient and unsolved.”

So on the opening morning of the new year, and the day after, and now trice again in a week, long after the sparks and cinders have faded and cooled from New Year’s fireworks, we have faced an almost metaphorical and mystical beginning of 2021. Fog that made everything seem ancient and unsolved, unlike this bookended year we’ve hopefully parted from. This sad and seemingly unending tale.

A year filled with a deadly pandemic and political unrest, with true-life scenes and scenarios in our very own White House and capitol, scenes not unlike what Peter Sellers’ character faced in his Inspector Clouseau films. What seemed so funny in film fiction didn’t translate so well in real life, not with the egging on of bigotry and political unrest caused by hardcore, home-grown terrorists bearing weapons intended for human carnage and encouraged by the president; not with a completely mishandled pandemic that continue to costs us more lives per day than died in 9/11 and now numbering nearly 400,000; not with lock-downs, masking and a complete social shutdown for the covid conscious. Not with all the attacks on our environment; those oil leases on previously federally protected lands among other autocracies and the sale of National Park lands.

Our past year was both terrifying and life changing. As a society and as a country we’re anticipating a curtain being drawn to life more seemingly “normal,” although we have no knowledge of how our new normal may look, of how the new story will unfold. That is all behind the undrawn curtain; behind the fog of our metaphor. As our fog eases in over us perhaps in the lifting we will ease into more settled and compassionate times.

As the curtain is slowly drawn the lighting begins giving mystical joy to this metaphorical stage, for in our temperate part of the country, with below freezing temperatures accompanying this dense and impenetrable grayness, we find a magical hoarfrost coating every inch of fog-touched surfaces, coatings of star-shaped beautiful icy clusters. On trees and prairie grasses, coating every twig and blade as if dusted by a fog fairy. Edgy at a glance, though comforting in a glossy beauty.

All of which begs for a journey within the ancient and unsolved, where those stark heavy branches of oaks and cottonwoods are suddenly jeweled, where the nuded bulbs of solitary cone flowers glisten as if donning a queen’s crown, where leaves of big bluestem curl poetically within the depths of a prairie, dotted perfectly with frost as surely as they’re coated with poetic drops of dew in a summer sunrise. All magical and mysterious moments.

Sometimes just inside this curtain a solitary tree allows it’s unique personality to show, one that is too often blended into a woodland or hillside much like a beautiful woman blends into a dance floor crowd. By itself its trunk and limbs become silhouetted and solitary, a wood-thick personality often stark and challenged in symmetry. As the curtain eases further open it blends into a grove or cluster of trees, as the curly blades of bluestem does in a sea of browned and crusty outlined prairie grasses. All offering a widening visual world beauty now seen as if for the first time. 

As the sun begins the eventual burning away to slowly draw further open the curtain, this shortened visible world grows wider around us, becoming ever more slowly revealed. Initially a fog forces us to focus on the near, for there is no afar. We trust it exists beyond the curtain, and as it is slowly unveiled we maybe see our world differently than we had before. 

Finally, and with gradual aplomb, a hazy light begins to peek through the gray … a hazy stage light beginning as a softened, unfocused circular globe before easing into a more focused yellow richness. As we lay back to look straight above us, this grayness yields to deeper tinges of blue, a canopy of space undefined in the broadest of senses. 

Rarely does this curtain remain closed for long, perhaps until midday as Carl Sandburg’s iconic cat starts rising on silent haunches before moving on. 

As this metaphorical curtain spreads open we wish this “moving on” bring us greater joy; an ability to see one another unencumbered with chaos and distrust. Will those crystallized out-linings fit for a queen allow each of us to evoke more warmth from what we know is both numbing and cold? 

Though a fog blankets us with a mundane gray we must still seek beauty, for it is there. In our world. Our familiar world, that which is ancient and unsolved, yet beauty that is ever widening in the unveiling.