THE FALLING OF SNOW
By: Gilbert Pilayre
With yours truly being born in the tropics, where the sun God lives almost permanently, you could just imagine how winter ravages our souls. January and February wear the deepest mantle of winter’s reign—months of hushed silences and crystalline stillness, where the world seems to hold its breath beneath blankets of snow that erase all boundaries between earth and sky.
The cold cuts to the bone with a clarity that feels almost pure—air so frigid it burns the lungs, turns breath to visible ghosts, makes the very act of existing outdoors a defiant gesture. Snow squeaks underfoot with that particularly dry resistance, each footfall a small complaint against the compression of cold.
No more of the sunbirds, but only crows and ravens cutting sharp contrast against the white blanket. You don’t bother anymore to look at the floating flakes of snow that seem to dance around you like teasing nymphs. You just let them drift onto you, your coat, your face, gently, and brush them off when you arrive home as the warmth clouds your pair of glasses if you’re wearing one.
The ache of winter carries both the comfort of stillness and the loneliness of short days—a season that wraps you in warmth while reminding you of everything that’s absent. It reminds us of the ancient Taoist principle of duality fused as one. Nothing is permanent. The only constant in yin-yang is change. The symbol itself captures this perfectly: the curved line between black and white isn’t static; it suggests perpetual motion, like a wave or a spiral. The two forces are always in flux, always transforming into each other.
Linking Hegel’s philosophy with the concept of yin-yang is a fascinating way to bridge Western and Eastern thought. Hegel’s core idea is that history and thought move forward through the clash of opposites. This might be the hardest truth: within every beginning is the seed of ending. Within every ending, the possibility of a new beginning. Birth contains the inevitability of death; death makes space for new birth.
While Hegel focuses on progress through conflict, the Chinese concept of yin-yang focuses on harmony through interdependence. Nothing is purely yin or purely yang. A person can be yang—active, assertive—in one context and yin—receptive, reflective—in another. A mountain is yang compared to a valley, but yin compared to the sky. Identity is relational and temporary.
The goal is dynamic equilibrium, where imbalances naturally correct themselves through continuous adjustment. Like riding a bicycle: you’re constantly making micro-corrections, never perfectly balanced, yet the overall movement is stable. This understanding makes yin-yang fundamentally different from dualistic Western philosophies that see opposites as locked in eternal conflict—good versus evil, mind versus body, spirit versus matter. In yin-yang, opposites aren’t enemies. They’re dance partners in an endless, flowing exchange.
It’s why the philosophy feels so true to lived experience: nothing lasts. Pain doesn’t last. Joy doesn’t last. Power doesn’t last. Weakness doesn’t last. Winter doesn’t last. The only thing that lasts is the process of transformation itself.
And so, as I stand here brushing snow from my shoulders, watching the flakes continue their eternal descent—each one unique, each one temporary, each one already melting—I think of the tropics where I was born. There, the sun reigns with almost permanent dominion, and snow is only a word in books, a flicker on television screens. But even there, the principles hold: day becomes night, dry season yields to monsoon, youth inevitably ripen into age. The snow will melt. Spring will come. And one day, perhaps, I will return to that place where the sun God lives, carrying with me these winter lessons written in white—how absence teaches presence, how cold illuminates’ warmth, how the falling of snow is also, always, the promise of its thaw.