I Am Not a Flake!

[Peg Herring]

Everyone in Michigan has the same thought this morning: snow. It's here, it's on its way, it's going to continue. Deal with it. Driving home from Petoskey the other day, I saw those first gentle flakes fall. Each one was tiny, fluffy, and light. The next day I shoveled several inches of the stuff off my sidewalk. The tiny-fluffy-light thing was totally somewhere else.

Everything big is made up of things that are small. (Isn't that profound?) Like the Walrus and the Carpenter, we wonder how so many grains of sand come to be a beach. Like The Dancing Wu Li Masters, we consider how particles that are literally nothing make up something, anything, everything. And as writers, we see how a letter, a word, a phrase melds, given the right conditions, into something worth considering. The world doesn't come in chunks, and neither does good writing. I guess I have to start out as a flake, after all, and build on that.