A Sparkling Performance

Watching the wind move fine snow over the landscape is mesmerizing to me.

The snow dances,

whisked low, sifting as smooth as the most refined granulated sugar over the open spaces,

then spinning around to be thrown high, chasing billows of itself wild and free through the limitless expanse of the air.

The swirling and pouring creates this constantly changing landscape of fine layers, and miniature buttes, mesas, dunes and canyons.

Best of all is when the sun is shining at the same time, adding sparkle and shimmer and gold to elevate the entire show from mesmerizing to magnificent.It’s like an Olympic figure skating performance, complete with the artistry, sparkles and gold.  The wind and the snow, they are like the perfect couple, as the wind tosses the snow up, spinning, catching it again with effortless ease, moving in perfect time with each other and the sound of their own music.  Only it’s right in my front yard, nobody’s keeping track of points, and I seem to be the only one watching.

But there the comparisons will have to cease, because other than the suspense of who will win, the required precision and ranking system of such a human performance removes it from the sheer mystery and wonder to be found in the movement of the wind and it’s interplay with the snow.

It’s no wonder that Solomon chooses the wind, then, as his comparison to the great mystery of how God works.

“As you do not know the path of the wind…so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.“ (Ecclesiastes 11:5)

Or, as a more familiar passage states it:

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
            Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD.

      “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
            So are My ways higher than your ways
            And My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)