Snowfall in spring

“Lovely snow, it falls nowhere else.”

I think I derived this from two zen quotes — Layman Pang’s, “Beautiful snowflakes; they fall nowhere,” and another saying or poem which I can’t for the life of me track down. But it went something like this, “The rain does not know it is sad.”

I thought of my apparently derived quote today as the snow fell this morning on May 21, 2021. And I really did think “how lovely,” even as so many others had groaned at the cold and flakes coming down.

And so I talked about this idea of what lovely snow falls nowhere else means, with my son. We’ve been trying to work on feeling okay with not knowing answers to questions and understanding that we can all look at something and feel or learn something different from it.

Like this quote, the idea is that the lovely snow is falling just for me and can’t fall anywhere else. For someone else, the snow is not lovely, but cold and out of place and so that snow falls for them.

While our perceptions are important, we must also remember in the end, the snow is just the snow.