A Meaning for Melting

Another bright, sunny day! As more and more earth pokes through the ice and snow, I hear dripping and sliding from the roof. Melting.

When I feel down, depressed, low, I often equate it with feeling like I'm melting. Sliding from a solid, stable form to a puddle - shallow, dirty, small. I think I tend to see melting as something negative, a dwindling or fading away of something.

Melting is essentially the changing of forms from solid to liquid. In science, they even use the word "reduces" when referring to the change from solid to liquid. And the change always requires a catalyst. Like today, it is the sun and warm air melting the ice and snow.

I think my everyday existence is to be frozen. Solid, unmoving, and resistant of change. What freezes me into that state? Probably routine, the daily sameness, laziness, apathy, busy-ness.

I long for more liquid days, I long to be melted by the things that warm me into fluidity. My catalysts are found in giving and receiving - love, passion, music, peace, nature, light. There are far too few of these things in my life, but when I have them, I melt. I go from stagnant solid to flowing fluid, moving, pulsing, reaching, quenching.

Unlike the sun, our catalysts are rarely just given to us - they must be sought and sometimes asked for. So it's often easier to stay frozen solid and in a state of being where we are hardened to hurt. Being frozen is easier in a lot of ways. But how can we inspire if we are jaded? How can we relate with others if we are unmoving? How can truly live if we are bound up in ourselves?

By melting, we allow ourselves to be transformed into a different way of being. There is both a gentleness and a power to being liquid. Both a grace and a terror. But in liquid, there is life - there is motion. From tremendous waterfalls to ocean depths, from the drip of a melting icicle to the slow slide of a single tear. These are the places where we find beauty and inspiration.

But to be that, to do that, is to give in to the melting. To allow ourselves to take the risk of being changed even when the transformation might be, and usually is, painful. I wonder if the melting ice cries out in its final moment before it turns to water. If it does, I imagine it also feels a great sigh, the relief of releasing a tear, as it rolls on.

Sunlight is silent and sometimes we may not realize we're melting until the last frozen bit of ice is all that is left in our warming puddle. Maybe we cling to that piece, that last shard of our solid selves. Or maybe we surround it with our slowly warming waters, and all that it was - and we were - changes. Our molecules remain the same, we remain who we are. But our state of being has changed and in this new state we are capable of more - to move, to flow, and even to change again.

We may return to our icy state at times when we need to protect ourselves or when we're overwhelmed, or even when we fall back into the routines of life. But we never know when the sun will shine and melt us once again.

While I long to be liquid, I also long for the blissful moments when I am air, part of the atmosphere. To throw back our arms with abandon and breathe out until our entire being is exhaled and we are able to expand as far as we allow ourselves, weaving in and out of one another until we barely recognize ourselves, or each other. It is in those moments that we feel most connected with ourselves and the universe, and those moments are rare.

Which is why so much has been written about such things - finding our bliss, our nirvana, our purpose. What if our purpose is ever-changing? What if there are times when we are meant to be solid, when what is habitual for us enables the routines of the universe?

There will be times when we need to melt, to quench our parched and withered roots, curled and cracking from so much winter. And to sate the thirsts of others, to prepare their dry earth for seeds of their own.

When we find a place where the liquid of ourselves perfectly fills the fracture in another, or the dry riverbed of a need, that is when we exhale. And it is like finally releasing our breath after holding it to a point of pain.

It is the ecstasy of release where we linger until we are gathered up to begin the cycle again, collecting us as a cloud and falling as a gentle rain or soft frozen snow.

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