When You Have No Control of the Falling

Glacier Bay

Margerie Glacier

Iceberg Calving

"It all began with a snowflake," the ranger said as we gazed, jaw-dropped, at the coastline of Glacier Bay National Park, home to many of Alaska's glaciers, eleven of which reach the sea in this national wonder.

As the ship moved closer into the bay, cameras focused on the Margerie Glacier, twenty-five stories of ice that had a one-mile-wide foot dipping its toe into the water in front of us. Not content with dipping, icebergs broke off into the sea, calving to a continual click and whir of hundreds of simultaneous cameras, like a young child cannonballing into the water with calls of "Watch me! Watch me!"

But instead of words, the icebergs broke from their glacial mother with a sound like thunder - thunder that hurled itself into the water until it bubbled and boiled with a growing roll of white spray - a spray that rumbled and swelled with souped-up-bass-notes that shook the windows to my soul and pounded deep inside my bones.

The sound was alive and almost touchable as the surrounding mountains and water reverberated with an answering echo.

There is nothing silent about icebergs being born, although the glacier's conception began silently enough, with the falling of one snowflake.

"Fall on the earth," The Maker said (Job 37:6) and so the flake fell. The snowflake joined billions of others in a landscape that continues in its falling. In fact, everything about this landscape seems to be falling or waiting to fall as the pale blue glaciers flow slowly downhill into the sea.*

It's as if God picked up an artist's palette and painted the glaciers with a stroke of life-in-slow-motion. In His creation that also has fast moving cheetahs that clock in at 75 mph and peregrine falcons that soar with wings at 242 mph and luna moths that live all their fluttered glory in less than seven days and saguaro cactus blossoms that scent the desert skies for only 24 short hours, He sent this particular snowflake to take a 100-200 year falling into the sea, a century or two falling I capture on my camera lens.

But I want to do more than capture this falling.

I want to make sense of it all. The 24 hour falling. The 100 year falling. And all the falling in between.

I. Want. To. Slow. The. Falling.

But I cannot.

I have found this life lesson the most difficult. Thankfully, God does not leave us totally powerless. He gives us this one gift - the gift of the present.

I may have no control over number of days, but I have been given the ability to enjoy this one moment. And in enjoying the one moment, I get to enjoy life slowed down. Because as crazy as it sounds, the only way to slow down time is to capture the one moment, to mark it well, because, as author Gail Sheehy says, "The present never ages."

The present never ages.

“We need to change the way we measure time and to relax our insistence on control….Instead of focusing on the time running out, it should be a daily exercise…to mark the moment," Sheehy says. "The present never ages. Each moment is like a snowflake, unique unspoiled, unrepeatable, and can be appreciated in its surprisingness...."

Life in slow motion is found in the capturing.

Francis Chickering knew the power of the captured moment. A minister's wife in Maine, back in 1864, Francis became fascinated with the snowflakes she saw on her windowsill. She decided to capture the flakes on dark material. After memorizing their structure under a magnifying glass, she cut out their shapes from memory. She later published a book of over 200 snowflake cuttings - Cloud Crystals, A Snowflake Album.

Francis learned the lesson of capturing each unique moment in her own falling landscape.

She then cut out those memories and placed them in a book of remembering.

In doing so, she captured Life Slowed Down.

 ******

How are you doing in the falling? In the capturing?In this present moment, what would you examine and how would you capture the shape to your memory?

My list:

1. So many blues: indigo, azure, royal, sapphire.

2. Rumbling thunder shaking my bones.

3. One single snowflake.

4. A God who commands the falling but is also so great in the catching.

*from the Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler