Breaking Through

Thanks again to my teacher Miriam, for the prompt. Breaks - what's pushing up from beneath or within?

I love watching paper-thin sections of ice crack off like drifting continents in the spring thaw. It's Pangea - cleaving and sending her children adrift until they settle in their new homes. Those crackling rhombuses glide over thin water, slipping and sliding to rest, or maybe destruction.

(I can hear the crackle if I listen. Like tissue paper or cellophane.)

What's pushing up from underneath? What's been swimming around beneath the surface, waiting for a day warm enough to break through? Lurking in the watery deep, gazing up at the sunlight? The fragmented rays shine through the ice, turning solid just liquid enough to fracture and slide, crackle and glide, making way for the hidden treasures below to burst through to the surface and break into the light.

My creative spirit, my dormant artist -- that's what is breaking through. Right now she's just under the surface, face pressed to the ice like a kid at the window, ribbons of hair floating in the icy waters, eyes turned towards the clear blue day on the dry side of the ice. She pokes at the weak points, knocking, pushing mini-ice continents around from below, biding her time, waiting for the thaw.

She's coming.

It all comes at once, it seems. Or maybe it's the positive feedback loop. One thing fueling the next. In my head, I paint rooms full of canvas, fill books with ink. I cut and shape and print and seal. Actions remain thoughts, as there's not time for everything at once.

So I let ideas and inspiration marinate in my subconscious while I ride buses and change diapers and live fully where I am, turning back to ideas when the ice thaws enough to crack and open, making space for fluidity and flow.

Making space, that's what it's about. Leaving it open, being open, creating space for ideas to take shape and be born. Creativity doesn't come on a schedule or heed a call to duty. It springs up like bubbles in thin ice, filling the open spaces, the spaces between ice and water, solid and surreal.

So I let this top layer slip off, and peering into the small flowing spaces I see there's a whole deep below. In winter, all is covered and the ice is thick and we deal with life at the surface. But when we hit the thaw and the ice breaks away, there's another world flowing beneath, hidden to the winter eye.

It's just starting for me now, but Spring is coming and open water is on its way.

I want to flow. To move like water. To have a fluidity to my thoughts, to let it pour out. To flow over the cracks and breaks and fill them up. To flood the land, leaving puddles of life and beauty and art in my path.