The weight of a snowflake

"Tell me the weight of a snowflake," a sparrow asked a wild dove.

"Nothing more than nothing" was the answer.

"In that case, I must tell you a marvellous story," the sparrow said.

"I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow - not heavily, not in a raging blizzard - no, just like in a dream, without a wound and without any violence. Since I did not have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the 3,741,953rd dropped onto the branch, nothing more than nothing, as you say - the branch broke off."

Having said that, the sparrow flew away.

The dove, since Noah's time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while, and finally said to herself, "Perhaps there is only one person's voice lacking for peace to come to the world."

This morning I went to buy a new hinge for a kitchen cabinet...I know... not a captivating first line of a blog (maybe I should get a refund on that creative writing course). Believe it or not such a mundane distraction is actually welcome in my life at the moment. Anyhow, having got some excellent advice form the business owner (on hinges of course) I found myself engaged in an hour long conversation with him about the emerging consciousness. "Had I seen Cowspiracy?" "Had I read Graham Hancock?" "Don't get me started on 9/11" etc.

His enthusiasm and knowledge was incredible but by the end he demonstrated a sad and familiar resignation as he said he saw "no way of breaking free of the slave system without a bloody revolution." As I offered him the alternative idea of a consciousness revolution I thought of the above passage and shared it with him. I pointed out that if buying a hinge could lead to such an aware conversation things must be changing. We may be just one conversation, one act of kindness or even one thought away from the paradigm shift which has happened, is happening and will happen depending on your current attention point.

The snowflake passage is lifted directly from a wonderful book by Joseph Jaworski called Synchronicity - The Inner Path Of Leadership. Written in the 1990s this book has been a long standing inspiration to Tracy in her work  and it boldly invited the reader to participate in shaping the future, seamlessly weaving the physics of Bohm with the commercialism of corporate economics and the unspoken power of the human spirit. If such progressive thought was being embraced in the 1990s with powerful and influential backing from many sources, how come we look at society today and see it riddled with greed, separation and, on the geo-political stage at least, such a seemingly hopeless landscape?

The world still seems to be held in the limiting grip of the last vestiges of a patriarchal elite, invested in archaic (or archonic) energy systems and destructive medical models, operating in a way which seems a million miles from the aspirations and expressions of the vast majority of people I interact with. My personal experience of people bears no resemblance to the fear based portrayals churned out by the lame-stream media, nor the equally terrifying alternatives. If I pay attention to what is real I can't help but notice how wonderful and kind most people are (and have always been). Of course there are those acting out of fear and lack, but the world, and the people in it, is actually a lot less scary than those in charge would like us to believe.

It may take a lot of snowflakes to bring that branch down, but each act of kindness, each act of giving, each act of love makes the work of the fear-mongers that much harder. You may not be snowflake number 3,741,953 which finally breaks the patriarchal system but your conscious engagement with life in every moment is priceless in the consciousness revolution. 

Bill