The Weight of a Snowflake

“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a coal-mouse asked a wild dove.

“Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer.

“In that case I must tell you a marvelous story,” the coal mouse said. “I sat on a branch of a fir tree, close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, not in a giant blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch – nothing more than nothing, as you say – the branch broke off.”

Having said that, the coal-mouse flew away. The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on change, thought about the story for a while and finally said to herself: “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come about in the world”

(By Kurt Kauer, excerpted from The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace by Jack Kornfield)

For one human being to love another:
That is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks,
the ultimate test and proof,
the work for which all other work is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke