By Vijay Phanshikar
The thin veil of mist
Heralding winter ...
Paradoxically warm ! 
 
 Prose  

WHEN they come in, the winters are like that -- bringing a paradoxical warmth for the human soul. The mist looks and feels like a light, warm comforter that wraps around the shoulders -- giving the body a welcome warmth. By itself, the mist is cool -- even cold in later days -- and wet. Yet, for those who love the change of season, the mist comes in as a warm envelop to begin with. Welcome in touch and texture. True, later, the winter would assume a biting quality, and hit one’s bones. True, a winter stretched long is almost calamitous, so to say.

 

Yet, early mist, that azure haze that falls lightly on everything -- the trees, the lakes, the lawns, the hills in the distance -- feels a welcome event. During the day and in the night, the mist looks like fulfilling one’s dormant desire of that thin veil Mother Nature draws over the earth -- as if to secure everything with a warm velvet touch, assure everybody of her caring presence. For the photographers and painters, this mist, this haze, presents a new invitation to capture it with the camera or with the brush. And when that haze appears on the paper or the celluloid in its full, light glory, the joy is beyond words.

 

The poets, too, spend energy to capture the misty romanticism of winter morns. Such is the invitation of the mist ! No matter it is winter time, the early mist has a paradoxical warmth that appeals to human emotion like nothing else. To step out into the misty twilight of winter mornings, thus, is an activity so much loved by all.

 

As one steps out, the mist zeroes in from all directions, enveloping the body and the senses in a feather-touch feeling that many choose not to disturb with words of description. A walk in the park in misty winter morns, thus, often turns out to be a deep experience of silence. The mind remains unstirred -- not placid, though -- but enjoys an unspoken titillation of innermost emotion which words often fail to capture. With warm clothes on -- or without those -- the early mist in the early winter is never biting. It actually caresses one’s senses like nothing else. It is warm and cosy and lightly hugging one’s mind.