Imagine You Are

Imagine you are a snowflake and you are born in a high cloud on a bleak and bitter winter day. And for the longest time, you’re borne on and travel the lofty and majestic winds that sweep the crescents of the sky, always surrounded by other snowflakes, all alike and all different and all traveling together, to the same and different destinations. But it’s not the destination that matters, it is the journey- the journey upon the wind, where high-born kinsmen and lost brothers and sisters sail together and apart, always and never.  Always meeting in fleeting moments, yet never meeting, and borne on the shrill wind of a single, unimportant, unremarkable, cold and gray winter day.

You dance on the high winds and you mingle and meld with other snowflakes, all the same and all unique. The gray slate of clouds is your world and your umbrella — and you swirl and float and dream and live in the gray and other shades of black and white. It’s the only world you know, but you’ve heard of a world where there are other colors — browns and reds and yellows and greens and blues and all the shades of all the other colors…you’ve heard of rainbows, and unicorns, and soft sweet spring meadows, but you realize you will never ever see them, but you dream of them all the same.

In your gray and white and black world, it’s hard to imagine what color is, but you try. You try to imagine another world of solid things – things of color – ones you’ve never seen, one you can’t imagine. And every day you sail the skies embraced by frozen misty clouds, ethereal and real, and skip and dance and ride the winds that sustain you, while all the time they are slowly killing you. You know this and yet you dream on and mingle and meld and try to imagine you’re special and unique — different from the others yet the same also.

There is a comfort in knowing you’re like the others, there is a discordance inside you too. You’re unique and yet you’re the same and you are uneasy in your knowledge; you are always alone in your thoughts, yet you’re never really alone. Drifting and dancing, you are up and you are down, you are inverted, converted, diverted, and you are warm and you bask in the stinging cold winter winds but  you are cold all the same.

Your world is icy and ephemeral, your dreams are tangible. You think of color, but it is nothing save a vague untouchable, unimaginable concept, folklore of older, wiser snowflakes who’ve left the kingdom of the clouds and died far away, in a place you cannot know.

It doesn’t seem so long ago you were born in the clouds and borne on the winds, an infant, a child, an adolescent, an adult — all the same and all different, all steps on your way.

On a bleak, bitter, typical morning like every other in your time in the clouds, you feel something you’ve never felt before, you feel yourself falling.

As you emerge from the clouds you see a dark and ominous sight below you and you cannot comprehend what it is. You dance without feeling and you drift without design; you’re falling and you can’t help it – adrift in an unknown world, still surrounded by others, all the same and yet all different.

As you fall the world below you glistens and radiates with the colors you could never quite imagine. Beings in coats and things moving below you and great structures made of materials your mind cannot grasp. Yet you are falling and you cannot stop and you are afraid. As you come closer to the world of color and substance, you become aware that your life has been a journey and the destination lies beneath you.

You remember your time in the kingdom of the clouds and for a moment you long to go back, yet you know you cannot. Now you can see the blues and oranges, and the reds and the yellows and the browns and the greens and shades of color in the strange world below. In your heart you know your life will end there and you feel the peace of the inevitable – the peace of wisdom – the peace of certainty.

You look around and you see you are surrounded by others just like you — all the same and all different. You are surrounded by others yet you know are all alone after all. Yet they are all falling silently to their deaths.

You are warm in the knowledge of certainty.

You understand now. There will be no more drifting through icy castles, no more floating on the wind, no more dreaming of color, no more dancing in the kingdom of the clouds. You’re falling into the world of color where children will build of your substance soft beautiful castles and snow forts and snowmen —

Your time has come…and you are gone.