Revelation

Scott Whitby, 2023

Not the book but the event. The event that strikes from nowhere, cracks the stained window, the sentence that makes the book finally make sense. It is said to happen when you don't expect it and is immediate and calamitous and disturbing and disruptive. It is the understood that makes everything understandable.

Not for me. At least there is no immediacy.

Revelation for me is not an event or even a bunch of little events. Revelation for me is an avalanche. Ultimately the avalanche started with a snowflake without which there'd be no avalanche. But which snowflake? What part of that snowflake failed to cause the first crack in the snow's resting integrity and make it unstoppable?

More than that, it is an avalanche in slow motion but with a momentum of new ideas and awarenesses, building though.

I worry for a minute it will crest and slow and stop. That's what avalanches do. But they don't. They pause, still with potential energy in the truest sense of the term. They pause and wait for the next impulse, like that single snowflake. This time it's the single ray of sunlight that melts the lattice bonding two molecules of water as ice. Then another and another. But which? It flows again this time as water, gaining momentum again but still for me in slow motion.

Which snowflakes will find the ocean and rest finally and which will rise and start over and be snowflakes again?

Which will I?