The Isolate Beauty of Snow Flakes
This morning I was waiting for the train to get to work.
I don’t like to wait inside the shelter, it reminds me too much of cattle stuffed into some kind of strange glass holding tank. I opted to stand outside in the heavy snow fall instead.
I watched the snow gather onto a dark green metal box (housing communication diodes and whatnot no doubt). I looked at the mass of snow and thought how pleasant it looked. While it looked like a uniform mass it was, in fact, made up of a myriad of individual snow flakes. I mean obviously it was but actually looking at the snow in that way was interesting. We say “its snowing today” not “millions of snow flakes are falling on the city” thus emphasising the mass of snow rather than the individual flakes.
The snow flakes that fell directly on the heavy green box (what is in there anyway!? It is much more Mysterious not knowing I suppose) melted instantly like some strange frozen meteor plummeting to a molten green earth. The flakes that hit the amassing snow lingered until hit by another plummeting meteor. If I looked closely I could make out the individual points on the flake. They were quite beautiful. However, I realised two important points.
1. The flakes are only beautiful when view individually, isolated from the “snow”.
2. The only way to really see their beauty is when they are magnified dozens, hundreds of time. Looking only at the surface offers only a surface beauty.
So I offer you this question: what can you do today to distance yourself from “snow” and how far can you magnify yourSelf to fully appreciate your Beauty?
This is the exact opposite of a haircut. While people may also say “I’m getting a haircut” instead of “I’m getting thousands of hairs cut”, it’s not the individual strands that are important, but the cut as a whole. That being said, I’ve never had a problem with appreciating the snow flakes (I think I focus on the details too much), it’s seeing the big picture that’s always been hard for me.
Ah Jeff, I see from your comment (and thank you for that!) that you are highly rational and analytical. I suppose the nature of your wonderful art demands such conscious attention. What about the question I offered you? How can you use it right at this moment? How can you separate your Isolate Intelligence from the collective that You are submersed in? I suppose a different question just for you would be: Who is the You that is trying desperately to merge with the Tao?
Your original question didn’t really work with me because I see snow as more beautiful when it blankets the world, not as the individual snowflake.
And as for your other question, I’m still trying to figure that out.
Ok, lets try this then. What is the blanket of “snow” without the “snow” flake? Without the beauty of the Individual there can be no collective beauty.
And why are we not driven insane by the sound of millions of snowflakes hitting various surfaces [some even less mysterious than Lloyd's "green box"]? Is it because we are too deaf to hear the sounds of the universe or because we choose to screen out the sounds of the flakes screaming as they vaporize or merge one with the other?