I walked through the forest this morning.

  Snow lay thick on every branch, heavy enough to bend the youngest pines almost to breaking.

  The world was white and still.

  No birds.

  No wind.

  Only the soft crunch beneath my feet and the slow breath of my own lungs.

  Silence is not empty.

  It is patient.

  Beneath the snow, the soil holds its warmth like a secret.

  Roots stretch deeper than the frost line, drawing life from places winter cannot reach.

  Green waits there—small, stubborn, folded tight against the cold.

  A seed does not argue with the season.

  It simply endures.

  I knelt beside a fallen log.

  The bark was cracked, black against white.

  Underneath, moss clung—vivid, defiant, the color of first rain after drought.

  It had grown in darkness, fed by decay and memory of summer.

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  I touched it.

  Cool, damp, alive.

  The snow above had not killed it.

  It had only hidden it for a time.

  Humans fear the quiet because they mistake it for death.

  They fill the pause with noise, with hurry, with light that burns too bright.

  But silence is where the next note waits.

  Where roots remember the sun.

  Where green dreams of spring before the first thaw.

  I stood again.

  The forest exhaled...soft, almost inaudible.

  A single branch shifted, dislodging a drift of snow.

  It fell in slow motion, glittering like shattered glass, and beneath it the moss breathed easier.

  One degree warmer.

  One breath closer.

  Spring is not a sudden arrival.

  It is a promise kept in secret.

  A green heart beating under ice.

  A silence that has been listening all along.

  What small green thing are you sheltering today?

  It may already be dreaming of the light.

  — Bloom