Eight inches of the whitest snow changed the landscape overnight. For those of us who revel in the New, winter is a wonderful season in New England, with a Wyeth palette and frequent face-lifts to keep the mind moving and the heart — like a child's, still a child's — smiling at the constant Christmas arrival of gifts.

I suppose you have to see them as gifts to feel them as gifts. I exercised before breakfast by clearing a path from door to drive, for myself and my cabin-fever cats. As I worked, the blurry wake-up thoughts began to drift (like morning mist under the influence of sun and breeze, I think), and what remained came into focus as though, with shovel in hand, I had rubbed my eyes and looked around: cool breeze throwing spinnets of flakes from the rooftop behind me, a murder of crows shouting something from the other end of the cornfield, two cats watching my work from two windows, sweat beginning in the warmer parts of my body, a small opening being cut from the white, in squares, like cake, like ice-cream, like quilt battening, like ash.

I always begin work with a will; my body loves labor — to a point — and the first minutes or hour or hours of muscular intention always bring me back to life from some slow slumber, waken the mind, and deepen my breath. I admit, however, that there is a limit to my delight. At my big old farmhouse, for example, the drive was precisely the wrong length: too short to justify buying and fueling and maintaining a snowblower, and 30 minutes' effort too long to be completely happy with my workout. Once I had rounded the steps and the walk, and carved out a paddock for my car, and progressed several long paces toward the road, the last many meters (and the icy, salty plow-line at the end) forced a big breath into and out of me, and a great deal of determination.

Here in my in-between rental, while I wait for our ecovillage land to be purchased and built out, the deck is a fraction of my old routine. Everything is fractional, in fact: sizes, quantities, qualities of life perhaps, partnerships, responsibilities, all cut neatly in half.

I cleared the deck so I could stand and look out over the field. The crows had finished whatever skulduggery was theirs. The sky soft slate. My breath like smoke. I thought back to a dream I had many years ago.

I had been traveling, many miles, and many years perhaps. But this was my town, again. I walked to where the buildings began to thin, where the gardens were given more attention, and houses stood away from each other by a stone's throw, or a neighbor's call. A gate, unlocked. A home, simple, small, and tidy. A door, undecorated by welcoming. I knock.

Who answers is me. There is a smile in the eyes I have not worn. Did he speak it, or did I hear the smile. —Come in, come in! I've been expecting you!

The room is small and functional. A table with room for two, or four if their are friends. Along one wall a built-in bench. Everything feels like earth, like the southwest, or Brasil again, or Indonesia; decoration is at a minimum. A monk's cell; but the sense is that there are visitors a monk would not entertain, and in the corner a collection of instruments: two drums, rattles and tambourine and other percussion, pages of lyrics, the guitar, with its mother-of-pearl vine growing along the fingerboard. All was twenty years older, and twenty years more content.

Through a door there was a small kitchen, and beside it, a smaller sleeping space with a large bed and half-burned candles and books upon a shelf.

—It's good you have come back.

And the dream ended. I wonder at the picturebook my deeper consciousness opens. Is that a future or a past? Is it a physical space, or just one for the heart? Whatever the answer, time tells all, and generously allows us to record it, if we care to listen. It takes much longer to type and take dictation than the lightning-brand of a thought and feeling takes to shoot across your sky, that's for sure. I guess we select those forks of energy that are most shining, and allow the remainder of the storm to shoot by.

Now I have finished cleaning the small circle around this home — not unlike the earthen-walled home in my dream, I guess, if with a slightly less satisfied inhabitant. A few more flakes are curling out of the clouds. This afternoon I will go skiing, alone or accompanied.