Birds. Snow. Sunset.

Lately really want to try out bird watching, yearning to experience the process of waiting, identifying, and witnessing lives of such wonderful creatures. Would I be crouching in some bushes waiting for them to appear? Does it feel like a predator, only that you're not waiting for game? There's a bird's next outside the windows of my room, so now i can actually watch them everyday. I was talking to 3 of them the other day, when the weather was still warm.

It suddenly started snowing today, the whole campus became a somewhat a winterwonderland. I walked back from one end of campus to my room, looking at snowflakes falling, accumulating a thin layer of white on tree branches, the yellowed grass. It is also so quiet, so bright, so beautiful. Snowflakes linger on people's hair, coats, hands - such a calm presence. I even tasted some snow. Walking on fresh snow is such a peculiar sensation, leaving your very footprint on something that is so fresh, new, almost innocent. If it's quiet one can even hear the sound of one's foot stepping on snow. Almost crunchy, but so delicate, so soft, yet strong and dignified. The foot prints are but traces that will be gone in no time, whether it's being covered by new snow, or overrode by some other footprint.

I'm preoccupied with traces that we leave behind - footprints, lingering thoughts, musical notes and sounds, images, paint on canvas, scraps of plaster or marble that were carved out when sculptures are made. Objects owned, forgotten, thrown away. Do we ever forget them completely? Do they remember their own meanings, traces, or lament their being forgotten?