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\u2019re 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. \u00a0Always meeting in fleeting moments, yet never meeting, and borne on the shrill wind of a single, unimportant, unremarkable, cold and gray winter day.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s the only world you know, but you’ve heard of a world where there are other colors \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
In your gray and white and black world, it\u2019s hard to imagine what color is, but you try. You try to imagine another world of solid things \u2013 things of color \u2013 ones you’ve never seen, one you can\u2019t 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\u2019re special and unique \u2014 different from the others yet the same also.<\/p>\n
There is a comfort in knowing you\u2019re like the others, there is a discordance inside you too. You\u2019re unique and yet you\u2019re 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 \u00a0you are cold all the same.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve left the kingdom of the clouds and died far away, in a place you cannot know.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t seem so long ago you were born in the clouds and borne on the winds, an infant, a child, an adolescent, an adult \u2014 all the same and all different, all steps on your way.<\/p>\n
On a bleak, bitter, typical morning like every other in your time in the clouds, you feel something you\u2019ve never felt before, you feel yourself falling.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re falling and you can\u2019t help it \u2013 adrift in an unknown world, still surrounded by others, all the same and yet all different.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 the peace of wisdom \u2013 the peace of certainty.<\/p>\n
You look around and you see you are surrounded by others just like you \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
You are warm in the knowledge of certainty.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re falling into the world of color where children will build of your substance soft beautiful castles and snow forts and snowmen \u2014<\/p>\n
Your time has come…and you are gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019re 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\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7101"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7103,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7101\/revisions\/7103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}