Glaciers – slow moving, vast, ancient. They are massive sheets of ice that form under pressure over decades or centuries. They form where snow and sleet have built up to such an extent that the “melt” is less than the accumulation. At the “glacier foot”, chunks and fragments of contaminated ice drop slowly away from the ice field. This melts and flows downstream. The water is very milky from the glacial silt and debris.  After miles of flowing downstream, the melt water finally becomes clear.

The Bridge River Glacier in the South Chilcotin Mountains is a typical Canadian glacier. Stark and beautiful. Rock and ice. One can feel, see, and hear the slow, persistent movement of an ever-changing ancient geography. To stand on freshly uncovered land that is thousands of years old is to experience a very rare space.

It was in this very rare place that I recently had an epiphany of sorts. As I stood at the foot of the Bridge River Glacier, watching this ancient formation flow, drop and melt, it struck me how similar a pattern this is to our formation of new ideas and life directions.

Often our new ideas start out in a very rough form, unclear and full of extra debris – slow moving and perhaps even frozen in time. As we honour our ideas and let them follow their natural flow our ideas and life directions become clearer and cleaner. As we permit them to drop and melt it is the movement that lets the silt and sediment eventually sift to the bottom. Over time it is the movement that allows the direction to become crystal clear.

Movement. Our new ideas and life directions need to flow, to be acted upon. We have to allow them to thaw out of the frozen mass of our consciousness and let them flow free.