From my Nature Journal: Iceflow

I come silently upon a small, familiar creek in Rocky Mountain National Park, now absolutely frozen, rock solid. I have found it before as a spring torrent in June, have watched it as a small kaleidoscopic trickle flowing under clear ice in March. Even fell through its ice once. Not today. Nothing but stillness.

There it sits, immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar, its tranquility held nearly as solid as the foundations of the earth. Yet, though one might not know it, the current is somehow 

still there in the long silence of things.               

In this larger scheme, it is surely moving, flowing. The current hasn't really ended. Ice that grips rock today will alter its form and be down the Big Thompson to the Platte by spring, the Missouri and Mississippi by summer, finally emptying into the surprise of the great salty sea by the time the cycle of seasons pass again.

Yet today it is held in waiting, a seemingly immovable river of solid stone.

Things are often not as they appear. Wait. The Lord does not count days as a man counts days. What seems immovable, impossible today, is fulfilled in its time. Be patient. Wait for the Lord.

...Ask me in the spring if

things are still as immovable

as they seemed today.

And ask me in the spring if things are still as immovable as they seemed today.

God sends the snow like white wool;

He scatters frost upon the ground like ashes,

And hurls the hail like bread crumbs.

Who can stand against his freezing cold?

Then, at his command, it all melts.

He sends his winds, and the ice thaws. 

(Psalm 147:16-18)

~~RGM, from an earlier journal entry 

that I wrote on December 10, 2011

P.S. I saw the basic idea that inspired this journal entry some years back, but never have been able to find the original source again. If any of you are aware of it, I'd be pleased for you to point me in its direction. Happy New Year!