Death and snowflakes

The snow falling lightly on my window reveled itself to me one day.

All the little flakes waited patiently to melt.

Momentarily displaying their breathtaking detail, individual beauty and uniqueness.

I was there to see it.

But had there been no audience-the show would have remained exactly the same.

Little frozen moments.

Each a product of a singular piece of time.

A relationship with the universe.

When the wind blew just right to bare them into this world.

A thing that will never repeat itself again exactly the same.

How fragile and beautiful they were in their fleeting existence.

That ethereal first form.

Like the laugher of truly happy children.

I look past them to the mountains of their brethren that blanket the countryside.

In my small field of view there must billions upon billions of those flakes piled up.

Almost as if discarded.

But not quite.

No longer a singularity, now a mass.

Many individual things have become one.

Each of them had fallen from heaven and gathered.

Loosing their initial patterns forever.

Pressed over time into a cover for the earth.

Encasing the land in endless beauty while it waits for spring.

Moments and snowflakes are too seldom noticed as we rush through our lives.

Sadly it is often only when we look back at the end that we see the drifts of memories those moments have amounted to.

Even though we would like to dig-in and go back through.

To try and separate time and space.

To again experience the individual beauty they had when they first fell, we cannot.

You cannot pull a snowflake back out of a snowbank.

No more then you can add moments to the life when it is over.

I think that is what we miss most when someone passes.

That they will never be there again to see all the new snow flakes that will fall.

We realize how much of life’s unique seconds pass while we impatiently wait for spring.

But for some the next spring will not come.

We will be left with little more than a pile of moments making up a fragile memory.

Stop and watch the snowflakes.

Even the most similar bits of life happen exactly once, just like a snowflake.

There is imense beauty here.

Don’t let it melt away unseen.