All right, a quick show of hands... how many of you were thinking when you read the headline "Oops, he made a typo"? I'm betting virtually all of you did. However, you're wrong! I meant it exactly as it is written. Ponder these ideas while looking at the amazing sight of the Hubbard glacier in Alaska.
Since the world began, there is not one drop more nor one drop less of water. We have today what we've always had here on the planet since the start. (Just goes to prove that "recycling" is neither new nor original.)
In all of this time, the "form" that water, the essence of life, has taken has constantly shifted from liquid (such as the water you see here) to solid (the ice and snow of the glacier) to gas (the wispy clouds above the mountains.) Somewhere in, on or above earth, all three states consist of the same basic material; flowing, shifting, melding and co-existing, every drop is accounted for just as it's always been.
Take that mind-expanding idea and advance it one major step forward. One of the forms that water takes is snow. Snow is nothing but individual ice crystals falling from the clouds and piling up in various locations on earth. There is an absolute number that represents the total amount of individual ice crystals that have fallen since time began but I'm neither scientific nor mathematical enough to even guess how to annotate that here. As far as I'm concerned, "an infinite amount" does it for me.
...and not two of them have ever been the same. They have all been different.
That is the power beyond knowing that nature is. When I really thought about this, it overwhelmed me at first. However, it also gave me some new ideas, new ways of looking at things; those things are about you and me, the "snowflakes" of humanity. I started looking at "us" in a whole new light.
That's enough "mind-blowing" for one blog. Back with more tomorrow.
