This is sparkling snow as fallen on the ground. Now imagine the sparkles falling in open air.
Somehow the day is overcast, the sun is shining, snow is falling, and the tiny snowflakes are sparkling like flits of light. My vision has gained dimension and I am reminded how beautiful everything is. Now the blue sky is breaking through and still the flakes drop and sparkle and reveal themselves as magic dust. I know that this is about to end. It can only snow sparkles of light while the sky is blue for so long. I am experiencing a finite event with staggering beauty and it just ended, no more than 10 minutes in duration. The world has shifted back to normal and I sit having born witness.
Has the beauty ended though? That is a question about what memory is and how well we appreciate our experiences. When I started to notice the sparkles, I called up to my fifteen-year-old son Paul who was playing Xbox. “Look out the window,” I call. “Are you seeing the snow as sparkles of light?” I am wondering if I am just catching a weird angle of sunlight and the upstairs angle is different. Plus, it is morning and I am not wearing my glasses so who knows what tricks my 49 year-old eyes are playing.
Paul yells down, “Yeah. That’s sick! I’ve never seen that before.” Paul knows me well. He knows that I am having a moment of wonder and beauty. He also knows that the abruptness of his answer will frustrate me slightly. He knows that I want him to take in beauty and wonder, but he also wants to get back to his online video game with his friends. He lets a moment pass and searches for a way to acknowledge the depth of his father. “You should write a blog about it,” he calls down. So I did. This blog’s first paragraph is written with me watching out the window and my fingers trying to convey the fleeting experience I was absorbing in real time.
In my next book, the working title of which is Waking Again, I am currently musing about how we do not appreciate our memory at a deep enough level. We take it for granted because it is so ordinary when, in fact, it is incredible. Here is a different description of memory:
Our life is literally an unfolding of energy and energetic fluctuations. This energy is also traveling through space and time. Somehow we miraculously organized these fluctuations into experience. As times passes, the energy of the present moment transforms into the past and will never be in existence again. Except the energy of the present moment imprints us, imprints our consciousness, and a miraculous phenomenon we call memory somehow carries the past forward into to present and often the future. Our memory is a form of transcendence that honors the existence of other phenomena.
I turn back to the sparkling snowflakes and hope that I have done well. I have noticed. I have felt. I have shared with someone I love. I have expressed it in words to share with others. I accept that I have fallen short. But I have tried. This seems like a good recipe for honoring the only life we will ever have.