Snow... lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The Dead, Dubliners, James Joyce

Paralysis of the heart
Involves a continuing lack of empathy
For anybody outside
Our small circle of lived experience. 
Epiphanies - sudden, striking realizations
Where we see into the heart of things -
Suit us and teach us well.
As in the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles,
Commemorated on the feast of the epiphany
Epiphany can free us from paralysis:
All we need to do is to forget all that we expect of life,
Undo any falseness, hypocrisy,  pretension in ourselves,
Any cowardice;
Look upon the world with smiling eyes.

Time wrecks everything except for this faith in the importance of the moment:
Marriages crumble
Families disperse
All epics and rhapsodies
Flee from our lives
Leaving us amidst the mute greyness of despair,
We lack faith in what is not, physically,  there.
The hour of our birth
The hour of our death
Should not be barriers but portals
From which we see into the life of things:
Icicles, stalagmites and stalactites,
Preserve us from the contagion of greed
The stupidity of selfishness.
Let us be the bog poets
Exploring the depths, excavating, 
The wilderness of hearts
And imaginations
Reaching out to those
Who came before or after us
Learn to avoid the inherited detritus of Homo Sapiens -
The killer species.