The Crashing of the Ice -- An Analogy for Our Time
I had an experience once that keeps coming it mind as I read the news in these modern chaotic times. I shared it with one or two other people who also found it helpful. I thought I would lay it out here, for you all, in case it might be of help to someone else.
Once upon a time, I spent a week at a sesshin at Dai Bosatsu Zendo in the Catskill Mountains in New York State. The zendo is on the estate where Harriot Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is a beautiful, tutoresque building overlooking a lake.
[My dad was a Rinzai Zen Buddhist, and this is a Rinzai Zen Monastery, built on the lands of Mrs. Stowe, who is some kind of relative of mine—I know my grandfather visited the Beecher house for that reason—but I have not been able to trace the connection. I went at my dad’s suggestion, and prayed while sitting next to all the meditating people. ]
When I arrived in March, the lake was still and frozen. During the week that I was there, it started to melt.
I remember going outside and looking down at the lake, that had been so still, and being astonished at the change in it. What had been icy and solid had begun to melt, but it didn’t melt all at once. Parts melted quicker than other parts, so that the entire lake became a chaotic battlefield of ice foat against ice float, all crashing and colliding in a raucous ice chuck war.
I recall standing and thinking that from where I was, it was pretty, but if I were the ice, it would seem that the world was ending. Everything I knew was falling away, and there was no solid ground.
By the end of my stay, a few days later, I looked out at the lake, and lo and behold, it had gone through another total transformation. The ice had melted.
The lake was entirely calm.
A smooth surface everywhere except where it gently flowed peacefully into the river beyond.
This experience stayed with me because it is such a perfect analogy for certain aspects of life.
In particular, it is useful right now.
The ice is like our country—frozen with corruption and inefficiency.
The melted lake, with its placid waters, is the future of justice and fairness we all look forward to.
The days of chaotic havoc, when the ice bashed and clashed, is now.
Unfortunately, there is no way to get from the frozen ice to the peaceful, placid lake without passing through the chaos.
And that is where we are.
Hold tight through the chaos. What is ahead is worth waiting for.
2 When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: ...
(Isaiah 43:2 (to :)
(My dad was a Renzi Zen Buddhist. I spent a week there, twice, at his suggestion, sitting and praying to God among the meditating Buddhists. It was lovely and quiet.)
Aslan is on the move in the land where it is always winter and never Christmas! We have been abused and gaslighted for so long that it seemed like normality, but cracks are rapidly appearing in the edifice that seemed so all-pervasive and invulnerable, and whole chunks are falling off! The dread masters of verbal flim-flam whose whims became law are revealed as ineffective figures of ridicule, strutting and posturing as they are booed off stage. A new act is beginning.