As the Snow Thaws

In an instant, the snow thaws as the temperature rises and melts it slowly into pure liquid of life thoughts and buried emotions. Each of us is aligned with the snow melting on the glaciers of emotive mountaintops and the deepest valley crevasses of our lives. As I sit watching the snow recede down the driveway towards destinations unknown, I marvel at the suddenness of a snowfall and the mystery of its meltdown.

How typical our human experiences and emotions are like the snowfall deeply buried in our past, yet profoundly impacting our present. We live our lives in layers of potential meltdowns like a winter snowfall pristining its subtleties of power over the land of our lives. In an instance as life turns a proverbial corner, we are at the mercy of temperature changes and fluctuations that mirror our moods and life journeys. In a flicker of a nanosecond, a trigger happens that opens us spread eagle to the mountaintops and valley crevasses of buried life thoughts and deeper buried life experiences.

It is easy to miss the slow creeping of the snow into unthinkable meltdowns, but we welcome them just as we welcomed the embrace of the snow and the welcome of our memories and reflections. We continue to remain in slow moving denial and the snow continues to thaw towards it ultimate meltdown of fluidity. In our human experience, we stand stoic in our denial of buried memories and thoughts. We are semblances of life and deny ourselves a much needed thaw. Our denial becomes marked by the heaviness of a marbled gravestone on our hearts. We become frozen in who we could have become in our life and accept the facade of who we are. As snow metaphors, we melt thinly into the liquid forms of our existence and flow towards the inevitable of the dark places that we have chosen to cover with thin layers of ice and layers of snowfall.

As the snow thaws, so do we if we allow ourselves to accept our vulnerability and fallibility as human beings who are as liquid as a snow melt or as frozen as an ice field. We choose the rate of our emotive thaws and we choose the depth of our snowfall and what it covers and buries in our life. As the snow thaws, so to does that bigger part of us that dares to dream and hope for the change in our humanity. As the snow melts and flows into the life creeks of our reality, it brings for us renewal and surfacing of what is real and why.

I will miss the snowfall that has blanketed our world and provided reflection and wonder. I will miss how the world was captured if just for a moment in the snow coated arms of the Universe and how we stood frozen in life's embrace and our reflective moments. I will miss how a snowfall created opportunity and a life blanket to wrap ourselves within the deepest of our life thoughts. I will miss the slow synergy of snowfall and its thawing waterfall of liquid meltdown as life once again beats in a dissonance of heart drums and human disconnects and connects.

As the snow thaws, the deepest connections of our being can remain frozen in a time past. As the snow melts, each of us can choose our reconnections with our inner selves and humanity. As the memory of the snowfall etches itself into our collective consciousness, we can learn to live and love again and connect with the life we were meant to live.

Winter Thoughts-Part I

We all have life experiences that pull us into the blizzard of our memories and exorcise our buried life stories from cellular databases of our mind. Winter thoughts are the memories that lay buried in the avalanche of past loses; thoughts closeted in the dark places of our existence; and thoughts that flurry as the driven snow along mountainsides of our subconscious minds.

I have a vivid memory of a winter thought that dredges through my repressed trapdoors and comes calling to my consciousness as the snow continues to fall today. She was dying slowing as the cancer tore rampant through her breasts collecting her life sources into coagulated breathes and chest heaves. Death was closer in the December of her last connection to a life that would be but a memory soon. Six months prior, she had chosen to let go and let the spirit of the Universe that she believed in deal with the cancer and its annihilation. She took to her proverbial bed and let faith begin the healing process. She was a believer in all things in heaven and the miracles she had witnessed in the backwoods of the African jungle and the life manifest in the Sahara desert. She was one of the chosen....chosen to die.

I was a young soon to be graduate of college sitting in the semi-dark confines of my dorm room watching the December snow fall in layers under a streetlight appearing benign from a second story watch place. One light on a desk pierced through the darkness of the room as I struggled to remain focused on my pre-med course finals and the theology "death and dying"final that would start the following Monday. It was a Saturday night when winter thoughts created their own momentum and a frenzy of her, death and dying, loss, heaven, darkness, scrambling of heart desires, embraces forevermore and the finality that I would never see her again.

She had been a consummate presence of nurture and support as I braved the uncertainty of the isolation and cruelty of a college experience, the hope of a future so daunting and maligned, the coldness of next steps, the want of a soul connection in a world, I was too young to understand and embrace. It was her presence that propelled me into an early graduation, an application to medical school, and a need to prove that despite my life circumstances, I could move beyond and soar. She was the Gibraltar of my rock. She created a sense of belonging and frankly, my presence on the planet amused her. But she was dying as I sat figuring out organic chemistry's oxidation and reduction reactions and the meaning of death and is there life beyond the flat line.

She was being reduced into the aftermath of life as her lifeline squiggled into the flatness of physical death. Her time was running out and so was mine. Our life lines intertwined into a ropelike cataclysmic reverberation of systolic and diastolic pressures and heartbeats as I sat in my dorm room and she lay dying in the center of her king sized bed.

Lost in a Busy World

Have you ever just stopped in a moment of time and realized that you were momentarily lost in a busy world? Each day for many people is filled with a frenetic type of momentum that propels the human spirit into whirlwinds of unrelenting motion and emotional disturbance. Between our personal and professional world, we are tossed about on the spiritual bridge that connects us to the balance of the universe.

There comes a moment in time when each of us must stop in the tossing and breath. It is within this breath of renewal that our cells are infused with synergy and hope. We take breathing for granted as if the air that fuels us is a given right of our temporary inhabitance on this planet and of our life form. What we fail to truly understand is that we are so brief in the span of time called life. Our lives are in reality symbolized by mere nanoseconds of time stretched together in episodic life experiences.

We are indeed lost in a busy world that controls us within our experiences and our short lives on earth. When we stop for that brief moment, it is then that we realize how precocious life is and how we only have the moment of time that we're in at any given collection of seconds during a time span or life experience. We are the gift of life and not the giver.

To be lost is not about stopping to reevaluate our existences or our life contributions. Being lost is really about finding oneself in the chaos of frenzy that defines humanity. Taking time to reflect on what we give back to the planet is about finding that our time on earth was planned zillions of years ago in the twinkle of a star and the rising of the sun connecting with the setting of its moon. We are special in the uniqueness of our creation and in the blessing of our spiritual births.

Now is the time to stop and embrace the moment of our possibilities. It is the today in our lives that we must connect with the essence of our birth and the journey of our discourse in our nanoseconds of life moments. Yes, each of us is lost in a busy world. Our job in this life is to stop, breath, bless our universal birth, and touch the lives of humanity with the applause that we existed in the first place.