Today is a good day to be alive.

Fresh from my time of communion with mountain and snow yesterday, i awoke rather pleasantly to another glorious winter day, read a medieval anglo-saxon epic, and dicovered i could go skating with what was promised to be a fun group of people. This offer proved more enticing than said medieval epic, so i trundled off to rundle park to await the wintry festivities, only to discover my fearless comrades would not arrive for quite some time.
I spent some of the interim wandering the abandoned upper reaches of rundle, what i think, in summer, is the golf course. There was no reason for anyone to be here now, and i had it to myself. It was a moment of quiet perfection, a soul-deep sigh. The tailored, gently rolling lanscape, short trimmed meadows surrounded by tastefully spaced trees, clumps of firs, old, solitaryand thick-limbed birch and poplar, everything, from ground to reaching branches, dusted with a thin covering of snow, just enough to make this world thouroughly white -just enough that the dying sun, fanned out in orange rays against a glowing backgound of cloud, catches the frost with its fire, making this entire lanscape seem cut and sculpted from a sparkling white rock, or as if it were coated in the dust of diamonds. No footprints but mine and a few rabbits. following the path, pass through trees or over a hill and come to a entirely new scene: a meadow, a small arched bridge, an ancient, twisted tree, new and varied shapes, all cut from the same fine substance.

That feeling...was one i had forgotten. And i should not have forgotten it.

Skating, loomed over by the surreal but oddly beautiful backgound of the refinery, with its terraced gardens of lights and torches, and plumes of purple-orange steam, was also sublime. Our friends had lit a small fire on the island, and after a few laps i joined them there. To me, there is something in skating on a sort of pond, and gathering at a fire among trees to laugh, roast things, and drink hot chocolate, that springs from the deepest and best of human existence. It is, at the very least, the quintessence of Canadian winter. THAT is Canadian culture. Beer commercials, Bryan Adams and bland social-commentary plays can burn, for all i care. Preferrably in a large bonfire. By a frozen pond. With people skating on it.