Into the night you walked with me among stars under the light of a full moon just as you promised you would. Feet compact fresh fallen snow as it lay on ground lit with twinkling reflections from the heavens. Dreams and joys brought alive by the fall of night into the first day of the year. So is born a winter day from the echo of time compressed into the first day of the New Year. Feel the history of the world in a walk through the quiet places alongside the water we emerged from so long ago. Water that lies still and cold touched by the hand of night into sheets of crystalline ice patterns that reverberate into the morning sky as we cast small stones onto its surface. Soft shall strike the first rays of the sun onto the surface and the mists of the day are born to float laconically above the horizon. Snow may lie thick along fields so that they resemble a desert of whitest sand dunes. Oh the joy of footprints in unblemished snow and imagine we are the first too ever set foot on this beauteous ground. See the relics of the dinosaurs incarnate again as a Robin waits crouched in the heather with breasts aflame and then see the Sparrowhawk fall silently from the sky to take our new found friend away. How ancient bloodlust remains for watch close and though time may have shrunken their stature their deadly game of hunter and hunted is revealed. So we watch and see then a riddle revealed as the hawk is thwarted by us and the Robin seeks solace among our company. Yet what of our superiority when ultimately tis saved by loathsome rooks that wait at the water’s edge like ghouls. How we are humbled and enriched by this sight. Then too we see the five Cormorants wheeling and diving through the water and air as fluid as feathered snakes. For if such a day at the culmination of all the time before can bring so much joy then that time was not misspent and the one that gave me such joy shall be my love for all that remains of my walk among the world.