Most of the time we are all just muddling along, doing the best we can and hoping, just hoping that things will all work out one way or another. As strategies go the wisdom in this plan seems to be practical and it avoids the most serious shortcoming many people experience and that is worry and anxiety about things over which they have and never will have any control. That's why there are mornings like the one we had today.

When the light of day first appeared we were more than up to our ears in fog. Fog is one of those confusing things it masks reality, reduces our vision to a sort of watch for the next step kind of awareness but most fog watchers confidently await its departure. This morning it lifted ever so gradually but seemed to almost vanish leaving behind cold clear air and a steel blue sky fitted with a sun that made all things shine, just a bit.

I don't think I am much different from most people, I want to see things clearly. Having to wear glasses seems like a remarkable handicap because they get dirty. But this morning, clean or dirty glasses, it didn't matter the sun was there in all its brilliant glory and glitter is what it was all about. The fog had left behind frost that collected the fragments of light and dazzled the eyes making the shadows take on that shade of blue we winter people come to welcome and enjoy. The real issue is what does all this mean?

The important thing about being a person or a raven for that matter is to wonder about things. Everything we see and experience has a meaning of some kind and it is for us mortals to work these problems out and make sense out of what seems so often to be no sense what ever. The more information we get seems to promote this feeling of nonsense primarily because the information we are getting is fragmented just like the images we see as we look about on a beautiful morning like this one.

A pair of power units trundling off into the dissipating fog, clearly on a mission but to the uninformed witness it is unclear just what that mission might be.

These trees lean because for their whole life they have had to struggle against the prevailing west wind. It is relentless but they have just kept on growing albeit leaning a bit but a little wind is not going to stop them on their destiny to grow bigger, blossom into leaf each spring and drop those leaves at the end of the growing season.

Trees are like that and people like to admire the resilience and durability of trees in the face of often insurmountable odds. But, they deserve their place in the sun and it is for us to realise that we too can follow that example.

Did you know that snow and ice crystals form not upon some dust particle or fragment of their own molecular nature? These magnificent crystals depend on the biology of living material, the seed, nucleating agent, that gets a snowflake going or a bit of frost to form is actually some form of biological cell. This was discovered by people trying to create snow for ski hills (Steve Lindow) and they found that they needed something to seed the ice crystal formation.(Snomax) Snomax was the first biological product to obtain a patent. Something similar is at work in the natural world and certainly was apparent this morning.

I suspect that we really need to blow the fog away a little more often, the confusion of data that masks reality is all about us. Radio, television, the internet pages we read, the text message we receive and the conversations we have. All of these combine to create our own personal form of fog. The reason for our confusion is that information of all kinds is not sorted into facts, emotions, values and right things and wrong things, it is just information and we rely on each other to provide weight and substance to the information to tell us what is important and what is just trivia. Many people condemn gossip for carrying with it so much untruth but the essentials of gossip is the values and emotions that it contains. Therein we find what we in the society which we define ourselves weigh as important and meaningful to us personally.

We don't need to struggle with seeing through the trees of confusing data we just need to apply the rules of cold clear light. Under the basic conditions the water particles are frozen out of the atmosphere and the sun reveals the important things. So it is with information. Through conversation we define what is important to ourselves and with that knowledge can sift through the data to see what is real to us and needs our immediate attention.