The Hudson Speaks.

"Oh winter has arrived!" I tell myself as a gust of wind races past me, cutting my face with the sharpness of its frigidness. Off it runs howling in frustration as it gets lost in the lattice work of streets and avenues that make up New York City... It is cold. I don't remember feeling this cold before. Perhaps I should have worn more than a sweater today. I was fooled by the sunshine into thinking that it was still autumn when autumn came and went weeks ago.

I looked down at my hands only to find them buried deep into my jean pockets, so deep that my left hand must have torn a hole in the pocket itself for I could feel the warmth of my own skin against my finger tips. Bleary eyed, I walked on towards the Hudson river. Each step battered by the western winds, testing my resolve to find serenity at the city's edge. My labored breathing came in sharp stabbing breaths as the icy chill of winter frosted my lungs or so it felt. All this to stand on the edge of a platform off of the west side highway and look not out to the Jersey shore but at the river that lay in between.

Now I have arrived at my inner city sanctuary. I watch the choppy Hudson waters batter the river's edge and chaotically find its way to the sea. Somehow I feel the same at times. Even when the surface is calm, I know just as the Hudson knows itself that it is running off to somewhere far off. Beneath that calm is a raging undertow that follows a path that it never knew was set before it. But today you can see its torment, or perhaps I can see my own. But seeing the Hudson find its way to the ocean somehow comforts me into knowing that I too will find my way into that vast ocean that is mine. I whisper to the Hudson to be calm, it will find its way and the Hudson blows my words back to me on the wings of its western winds.

I shall be calm.