Older Than Ancient

As the stinging air of a winter storm in Minnesota goes scraping across your face it becomes impossible to think of anything other than escaping its cold hearted attack on your flesh. The snow flies and swirls around. At times the fresh snow falling from the sky plummets in these huge lazy clusters of snowflakes that are so scattered they almost look like stars in the night sky. Other times the snow comes down in the tiniest little flakes, but they come down so hard and so fast that looking out into the storm is like looking directly into a field of blinding whiteness. When you combine the challenge of being able to simply see anything in front of you with the real threat of hypothermia and frostbite, rarely does anyone take the time to think about how the sky all around you is full of snow that is older than ancient. The snowflakes that you caught on your tongue as a child and scraped off your car as an adult are the same snowflakes that fell on the dinosaurs.

It was almost freezing outside when this thought began to whisper its way into my mind. Almost freezing as in not quite freezing. Hovering somewhere around 29 degrees (on the Fahrenheit scale anyway.) The thing about it being almost freezing during a winter storm event is that the winter storm doesn't produce much snow. The colder it is the more snow will be produced by a relative amount of precipitation. To put it another way at 0 degrees 1" of precipitation will produce roughly 20" of snow, at 15 degrees 1" of precipitation will produce roughly 10" of snow, and at 32 degrees 1" of precipitation will produce no snow at all. When the temperature is hovering around 26-31 degrees what we get from a storm is a slushy, heavy, cold mess that is sometimes freezing and sometimes not. Usually that mess blankets and soaks everything in sight.

As I was shoveling the not quite frozen snow, I thought about how nice it will be when the snow is gone. I watched the snow turn into slushy puddles and impromptu street rivers that seemed to be in a rush to flow into a greater existence than these dirty street washouts. Flowing forever downhill into the storm drain or pooling in a low spot where it would surely become solid ice in the overnight. Something about my observastion of the snow taking on new life and searching for its next destination gave volume and clarity to the whispers that would bring an eternal message for me. The snow changes shape, and changes temperature, and changes texture, and changes structure, but it is never gone. In fact it never goes away. When the snow melts and disappears from our sight, it isn't gone at all. It has moved from one physical and molecular structure to another. The implication that the snow never goes away, instead it just cycles through our air, land, and sea in different forms with different structures over and over again carried with it a truth that is so fundamental about our planet that it should be common knowledge and yet, the idea stunned me.

So it has been since the beginning.

The same dirty, slushy, not quite frozen snow that I was watching run downhill from the driveways and sidewalks above me to the sea is the same snow that fell with the very first snowflakes to fall on this planet. The water that gave life to the first living organism on our planet at the beginning of time was the same water from which the snow had sprung forth on that day in the year 2021AD. Talk about ancient. Every drop of water on the planet is as old as life itself. When you see a snowflake falling through the sky and call it freshly fallen snow, remember the snow is not new. The freshly fallen snow is older than anything you or I could ever have known. Every flake of snow is ancient. Older than ancient. It is as old as life itself.