SNOW CRYSTALS

“How full of creative genius is the air in which these are generated!
I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat.”

— HENRY DAVID THOREAU - 1856

While falling through the clouds, a small ice crystal found itself in the middle regions of a branching matrix of points. Reaching outwards, feeling for changes in the air's humidity and temperature, the crystal formed itself into a six-fold stellar dendrite, and promptly landed on the shaggy white fur of a dog named Tutis.

A young girl enters the scene, underdressed for the occasion but too absorbed in her explorations. She is bent over, examining the ground before reaching up to the sky to snatch at the snow. Searching for clues, the mystery being the nature of life up in the clouds. 

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I imagine myself rising up through a swirling mass of flakes, their differing trajectories confuse my eyes as I focus on the middle distance. Up up up, till I reach the source, the origins of snow. Snow particles are being formed in a complex process of many stages. I imagine observing this everyday miracle, and I cannot help but feel that it is a kind of magic; one that is utterly explainable, but no less magical.

SNOWFALL

THE COLOUR OF SNOW

Light from the atmosphere will collide with a snowflake, bouncing and refracting off the many tiny crystalline parts. In a single snowflake, turned just-so, we may see a rainbow.

But when snowflakes gather on a hillside, all those angles suffice to refract each wave-length equally, until the hill seems to be covered in a white blanket.

TONALITIES

During the day, the snow on the hill will change in tone, in colour, in quality. On cloudy, snowstorm days it is a hazy green-grey; while on a washed blue sky day, the snow seems to be cleaner, brighter, effervescent.

Then there is that special time: dusk. At dusk, the snow takes on the purples of the clouds, the deep, shifting layers of pink and maroon.

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white is the absence of colour
as all waves in the spectrum are reflected and scattered
off a white surface,
white is the colour of light itself;
and yet
white contains all colours
just as light contains a rainbow

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STEAMBOAT SPRINGS

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SUBLIMATION | CO2(s) -> CO2(g)

The dead of middle winter
Glacés the waters
with
Hydrogen molecules and hexagonal structures

All but the hot springs, a holy place
A trinity of waters
Creeping ices
Visions of mist like foam in the air
And the waters wrapped around my body
Precisely the way clothing isn't

The dead of middle winter
Hurts my toes
Turns my hair into icicles
I am becoming crystalline

Triangular influences
Wrack my winter body
From the waist down I am water
Waist up I am steam
From high above the moon
pulls my blood
the way it affects the waters

A process of sublimation begins
A rarity
Dissolving a little at the edges
I am turned from solid form
Into steam
Mists and vapors
Draped over the earth
 

I am the one
Enveloping
the moon

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