Every winter the forest goes grey. The snow lies flat and tired, the pines stand like old men in a queue, and the sky hangs so low that the birds walk instead of flying. It is the season when people say: nothing will happen now until spring.
And every winter, somewhere deep among those pines, the Yeti wakes up and decides otherwise.
No one knows where he gets his colours. His coat is the shade of lilac and late roses, with streaks of yellow where the summer seems to have stuck to him. When he walks, he leaves pink and gold on the snow. When he lifts his arms, the air above him blooms turquoise and red, as if the forest had remembered for a moment what it looked like in June.
He is not a monster, whatever the old stories say. He is a holiday that lives alone. He comes out on the greyest day of the year, stands in the middle of the cold, and opens his arms to whoever happens to be passing.
There is a little sadness in it, of course. The colour will fade, the smoke will thin out between the trees, and by tomorrow the snow will be white again. But that is the kind of sadness that makes a celebration worth having. Joy is brightest exactly where it has no reason to be.
The mood was inspired by Joseph Brodsky's poem "Christmas Romance" (1961).
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2015.)
