Imagine

Imagine

Imagine you are a snowflake and you are born on a high cloud on a bleak and colorless bitter winter day. And for the longest time, you’re borne on the lofty and majestic winds that sweep the crescents of the sky, always surrounded by others like you, 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 on the wind, where high-born kinsmen and lost brothers and sisters float and sail together and apart, always parting and never parted. Always meeting for fleeting moments, yet never meeting, and all 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 yet all unique. The gray slate of clouds is your world and your canopy. You swirl and float and dream and live in a world of gray and other shades of black and white. It’s the only world you know, but you have heard tales 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, and buildings that touch the sky — but you realize you will never see them.

Yet 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, a world of solid things – things of color and substance – ones you’ve never seen, ones you can’t imagine. And every day you sail the skies embraced by the frozen misty clouds, ethereal and real, and skip and dance and ride freely upon the winds that sustain you, while all the time they are slowly leading you to your death. You know this and yet you dream and mingle and meld, trying to imagine you’re special and unique — so different from the others yet so much the same.

There is a comfort in knowing you’re like the others, there is a discordance inside you too. You’re unique and yet you are the same.  And you are uneasy in your knowledge. You are always alone in your thoughts, yet you’re never alone. Drifting and dancing, you are up and you are down, you are inverted, converted, diverted, subverted, and you are strangely warm as you dance on the stinging cold winter winds… and yet you are cold just the same.

Your world is icy and ephemeral and your dreams are almost tangible. You think of color, but it is nothing but a vague untouchable, unimaginable concept, folklore of older and wiser snowflakes who’ve left the kingdom of the clouds and died far away, in a place you cannot know. A place you will never see yet might see. If only you could understand what your life means.

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

On a bleak, bitter, typical morning like every other morning in your life in the clouds, you feel something strange. You are feeling something you have 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 or known destination — you’re falling and you can’t help it. You are 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 even comprehend. 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 colors that you’ve never seen before. You are dazzled and overwhelmed by the strange world below. In your heart, you know your life will end there and yet you feel peace and surrender willingly to the inevitable – the peace of wisdom – the peace of certainty. A peaceful feeling you’ve never felt before.

Falling gracefully and floating certainly to the incomprehensible landscape below. Peaceful and warm in your knowledge that somehow the certainty of the ending that is coming is just as certainly a beginning as well.

You look around and you see you are surrounded by others – all so much like you — all the same and all different. You are surrounded by others yet you know that you are all alone after all. And you are all falling silently to your deaths.

Yet, you are warm in the knowledge of the certainty that lies just ahead.

You understand now. There will be no more drifting through icy castles, no more floating on the wind, no more dreaming of color, and no more dancing in the kingdom of the clouds. You are falling into a world of unfathomable structures, unbendable shapes, and unimaginable colors; a world where children will build of your substance soft beautiful castles, snow forts, and snowmen.

Your time has come…and you are gone.

Imagine.