"Morning Silence" (Text & Image Copyright Wylddane Productions,LLC)
“Winter does not ask us to conquer it...only to witness it, and remember.”
January 2026 began wrong.
Stephen knew it the way some men know storms before the radio speaks...by the feel of the ground beneath his boots. The woods near Eagle River were soft, breathing out damp earth when they should have been locked tight. Fifty degrees in January. Snow reduced to gray shadows beneath balsam and birch. It unsettled him in a way he couldn’t name.
He spent his mornings at the workbench, shaping a paper birch bowl, shavings curling like pale feathers at his feet. January’s tree, he told himself. A small act of keeping faith. His grandfather had spoken of winters like this once...back in the 1890s...years of light snow and uneasy waiting, when men watched the sky more than the calendar.
Maya arrived with cameras and energy, boots slung over one shoulder, eyes already searching the dark. The Dark Sky, Star Bright festival had drawn her north...Bayfield’s promise of aurora threading green fire through blackness. Predictions were strong. Rare alignments. A photographer’s dream.
Stephen listened, nodding, while the stove ticked softly behind him. He told her about the First Bear Moon Gathering on the third...stories told low and slow, marking the time when mother bears turn inward, giving birth in sleep. “January’s a listening month,” he said. “Not a chasing one.”
The First Alert came on the fourteenth.
The sky sealed shut. Snow fell with purpose...thick, unending. Wind clawed at the cabin, temperatures dropping fast, the kind of cold that finds seams you didn’t know existed. When the power went out, the silence deepened, broken only by the woodstove’s breath and the distant boom of lake ice tightening its grip.
They were snowed in by nightfall.
Stephen brought out his winter counts...small, careful drawings marking years of freeze and thaw, hunger and abundance. Pictographs, learned from elders who understood that memory mattered more when words failed. Maya traced them with her finger, thoughtful now.
Still, when the sky hinted at clearing, she wanted to go. A break in the storm. A chance.
Stephen told her about the Perchten then...old spirits of January, said to drive out ghosts but careless of the living. “The woods don’t mean harm,” he said, “but they don’t mean kindness either.”
The storm paused.
They stepped outside together into air so cold it rang. The snow glittered like crushed glass. And there...above the frozen lake...the Northern Lights unfurled. Green and violet, sharp as prayer, dancing in the white silence. Beauty, immense and indifferent.
A snowmobile coughed in the distance. A neighbor, stranded on shifting ice...practice runs for the World Championship Derby gone wrong. Together they moved, slow and deliberate, hauling, coaxing life back into machine and man alike. No heroics. Just endurance.
By month’s end, the cold settled in for good...bitter, honest, familiar.
Stephen and Maya added a new mark to the winter count. A simple line. A turning point.
The year the thaw became ice.
Outside, the lake boomed once more—thick, sure, alive. And the woods, at last, were quiet in the way they were meant to be.
* * * * * * * * * *
Daylight is slowly arriving.
When I glance out the window now, it is no longer darkness pressing its face against the glass. Instead, there are outlines...trees emerging as suggestion rather than certainty. Shadows. Soft gradients of gray and charcoal, layered like a charcoal sketch not yet finished. It is strangely comforting, this gentle revealing.
On the desk beside me, my coffee mug rests in a small pool of lamplight, steam rising and disappearing as if it, too, knows when to be brief. I lift it, take a sip, and pause. Not because anything demands it...but because this moment does.
The world I wandered through a few moments ago was all blizzard and brilliance...howling wind, booming ice, northern lights burning green against the cold. Stephen and Maya standing at the edge of danger and beauty, learning what the Northwoods has always known: that wonder and risk often arrive together.
And yet here...this quiet.
Strauss’s Serenade for Winds drifts through the room, not interrupting the stillness but accenting it, the way light touches snow without disturbing its surface. The music feels like breath...measured, attentive, alive.
Dr. Wayne Dyer once said, “You can make your life into a grand ever-evolving work of art. The key is in your thoughts, the wondrous, invisible part of you that is your spiritual soul.”
This morning, I understand that a little better.
Stephen marked his winter with lines and symbols...a record of endurance, of listening. I mark mine with coffee, with music, with noticing the way the dark loosens its grip. The art is not in grand gestures. It is in attention. In choosing what we hold gently in mind.
Blizzards will come. Thaws will unsettle us. The aurora will burn whether we are ready or not.
But this...
this simple quiet...
this pause at the edge of morning...
is its own kind of masterpiece.
~Wylddane
January 2026 began wrong.
Stephen knew it the way some men know storms before the radio speaks...by the feel of the ground beneath his boots. The woods near Eagle River were soft, breathing out damp earth when they should have been locked tight. Fifty degrees in January. Snow reduced to gray shadows beneath balsam and birch. It unsettled him in a way he couldn’t name.
He spent his mornings at the workbench, shaping a paper birch bowl, shavings curling like pale feathers at his feet. January’s tree, he told himself. A small act of keeping faith. His grandfather had spoken of winters like this once...back in the 1890s...years of light snow and uneasy waiting, when men watched the sky more than the calendar.
Maya arrived with cameras and energy, boots slung over one shoulder, eyes already searching the dark. The Dark Sky, Star Bright festival had drawn her north...Bayfield’s promise of aurora threading green fire through blackness. Predictions were strong. Rare alignments. A photographer’s dream.
Stephen listened, nodding, while the stove ticked softly behind him. He told her about the First Bear Moon Gathering on the third...stories told low and slow, marking the time when mother bears turn inward, giving birth in sleep. “January’s a listening month,” he said. “Not a chasing one.”
The First Alert came on the fourteenth.
The sky sealed shut. Snow fell with purpose...thick, unending. Wind clawed at the cabin, temperatures dropping fast, the kind of cold that finds seams you didn’t know existed. When the power went out, the silence deepened, broken only by the woodstove’s breath and the distant boom of lake ice tightening its grip.
They were snowed in by nightfall.
Stephen brought out his winter counts...small, careful drawings marking years of freeze and thaw, hunger and abundance. Pictographs, learned from elders who understood that memory mattered more when words failed. Maya traced them with her finger, thoughtful now.
Still, when the sky hinted at clearing, she wanted to go. A break in the storm. A chance.
Stephen told her about the Perchten then...old spirits of January, said to drive out ghosts but careless of the living. “The woods don’t mean harm,” he said, “but they don’t mean kindness either.”
The storm paused.
They stepped outside together into air so cold it rang. The snow glittered like crushed glass. And there...above the frozen lake...the Northern Lights unfurled. Green and violet, sharp as prayer, dancing in the white silence. Beauty, immense and indifferent.
A snowmobile coughed in the distance. A neighbor, stranded on shifting ice...practice runs for the World Championship Derby gone wrong. Together they moved, slow and deliberate, hauling, coaxing life back into machine and man alike. No heroics. Just endurance.
By month’s end, the cold settled in for good...bitter, honest, familiar.
Stephen and Maya added a new mark to the winter count. A simple line. A turning point.
The year the thaw became ice.
Outside, the lake boomed once more—thick, sure, alive. And the woods, at last, were quiet in the way they were meant to be.
* * * * * * * * * *
Daylight is slowly arriving.
When I glance out the window now, it is no longer darkness pressing its face against the glass. Instead, there are outlines...trees emerging as suggestion rather than certainty. Shadows. Soft gradients of gray and charcoal, layered like a charcoal sketch not yet finished. It is strangely comforting, this gentle revealing.
On the desk beside me, my coffee mug rests in a small pool of lamplight, steam rising and disappearing as if it, too, knows when to be brief. I lift it, take a sip, and pause. Not because anything demands it...but because this moment does.
The world I wandered through a few moments ago was all blizzard and brilliance...howling wind, booming ice, northern lights burning green against the cold. Stephen and Maya standing at the edge of danger and beauty, learning what the Northwoods has always known: that wonder and risk often arrive together.
And yet here...this quiet.
Strauss’s Serenade for Winds drifts through the room, not interrupting the stillness but accenting it, the way light touches snow without disturbing its surface. The music feels like breath...measured, attentive, alive.
Dr. Wayne Dyer once said, “You can make your life into a grand ever-evolving work of art. The key is in your thoughts, the wondrous, invisible part of you that is your spiritual soul.”
This morning, I understand that a little better.
Stephen marked his winter with lines and symbols...a record of endurance, of listening. I mark mine with coffee, with music, with noticing the way the dark loosens its grip. The art is not in grand gestures. It is in attention. In choosing what we hold gently in mind.
Blizzards will come. Thaws will unsettle us. The aurora will burn whether we are ready or not.
But this...
this simple quiet...
this pause at the edge of morning...
is its own kind of masterpiece.
~Wylddane
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