beauty and the beast.

snow is beautiful. it paints everything white. it symbolizes christmas time, my favorite time of year even tho i do not celebrate the actual holiday. when you drive in it at night it makes you feel like you're flying thru the galaxy at warp speed, passing billions of stars along the way. anyone in the US who lives north of the mason dixon and east of the mississippi appreciates snow...mostly because you don't really have a choice.

unfortunately its beauty can be alluding. snow is unpredictable both in physical manifestation (flurry vs. blizzard) and in how it affects whatever it touches.

today i was driving down route 35 in yorktown, ny heading toward mt. kisco to visit my friend casey who is going back to school tomorrow. at this point it was dark and flurrying, so i was content appreciating my mock travel through the galaxy making sure to drive carefully because as i said before snow is unpredictable...

then everything changed. as i round a "hidden drive" as the sign indicated, i saw a red VW with its drivers side one with the pavement, a teenage girl outside of it hysterically crying trying to get cell phone service to call i would believe to be her mom...i was in complete shock because all i could think was there is no way she is the driver because there is no feasible way the driver could have gotten out of that car and be standing up without a scratch...before my shock could wear off i saw police lights, a firetruck and ambulances which i believed to be heading toward that car, but in fact they were all stopped...not a half a mile away from the red VW was a gray sedan flipped completely upside-down on the side of the road with 3 people, 2 of them wrapped in blankets hovering near one of the police vehicles...

i'm now sitting here in my home in one piece watching news channel 12 to see if there is any news on these two independent incidents on the same road in the same mile...

snow is neither solely beauty nor solely beast. it is both...simultaneously...in fact everything in life is both beauty and beast simultaneously...you can't have one without the other, nor can you appreciate one without the other...so living in fear of the beast leaves you without beauty...and what kind of life is that?