Last year, I read a book about a man named Wilson Bentley, who coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.” He is the one who discovered the actual reality that no two snowflakes are geometrically the same. Bentley was a New England farmer who fell in love with the beauty and individuality of snowflakes…. What amazed Bentley was the realization that each snowflake bore the scars of its journey. He discovered that each crystal is affected by the temperature of the sky, the altitude of the cloud from which it fell, the trajectory the wind took as it fell to earth, and a thousand other factors.
- Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
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The scars of the journey. I like that, because it’s true. And how wide and vast the differences in our scars! I thought, too, while reading this, of your other post about “earthquakes of the soul”–all of that’s included…
Thanks, Lindsey, for sharing…
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I love this – what a great way to think about journeys and the scars that they inevitably bring. There is a wonderful book of photographs of snowflakes based on this….
Thanks, as always….
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God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas,
but for scars.
– Elbert Hubbard
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admin Reply:
May 27th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Wow, I adore that. Thank you.
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I was always comforted to watch the snow blanketing Chicago and marvel that each flake could be unique, and yet also so uniformly beautiful as a collective.
Still the notion of scars puts a new, vaguely sexy, spin on “pure as the driven snow.”
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