Snowflakes are unique in their shape and size. No two snowflakes are the same. This truth is well known. Snowflakes also never remain the same once they hit the ground or even the tongue. Snowflakes melt, connect to other snowflakes, and freeze into other shapes. Snowflakes, in essence, are not only unique but impermanent. So is true for our experiences.
English author and illustrator Bernadette Watts brings her inspiration for nature into The Smallest Snowflake, a heartfelt story about a little snowflake who journeys to earth with the other snowflakes while holding her dreams quietly in her heart.
I'm standing in a field of mud. It gets muddy here after it rains, and since we're only 20 miles from Lake Michigan that can happen frequently, even in July. There are naked and topless women all around me, probably the widest assortment of bodies I've ever seen. Not just black and white or young and old or skinny and fat; those are present, but really, we're talking about all the varieties of ways in which women's bodies develop, the hair, the boobs, the lines and scars that run across thighs and bellies and breasts that are sometimes as distinctive as snowflakes. Nobody seems to care about those differences, though. Sure, there are women hooking up. Everywhere. With 8,000 (mostly queer) women on the land, it'd be a surprise if they weren't. I always say, if you bring a girlfriend here, be prepared to leave without her, because time on the land is so transformative, almost rapturously romantic, that anything can and does happen. This female utopia, where women take shifts to chop carrots or make the campfires or do all-night security, is also safe. For most of us, it's the first or only time we've ever felt truly, 100 percent safe from harassment, objectification, judgment, violence, rape.
People who consider their religion as setting them above others, believe their wealth, race or special snowflakeness entitles them to special treatment are going to be bad tippers and petty, annoying, even abusive customers.
df19127ead