Tonight, winter revealed a treasure! Ice on Musselman’s Lake. The ice is just gorgeous. The entire lake shines, and the house lights make long bright streaks across the surface. I went skating for my exercise, and skated all around the lake, along the length of the shore and then dog-wandered looking for the smoothest ice. There was no snow anywhere, but many patches of bumps and ripples, and when I skated onto the first patch of black ice, it felt like the world had dropped away and I surfing the edge of another universe. It was an experience both awesome and more than a little disconcerting, more than a little like expecting to walk across a hole into which you could fall for a very long time.
But it had such patterns frozen inside, I could have spent the whole hour crawling on my knees just to look at such things, where the ice had shattered and frozen leaving track marks, and mysterious vortices that looked twisters frozen into a black sky, or the effervescent ice that sparkled like a million stars. And in the gray ice there were all these frozen holes with their radiant tentacles extending outwards; it was all quite beautiful, and so was the skating, and those divots of black, that are all over in the grey ice, are like peering into down into another universe.
And once again, as I raced across the ice, I had that strange timeless feeling, thinking if this moment would just go on forever it would not be such a bad thing, not even with the grey sky and the gathering dusk and the distant houses, which lent everything a lonely surreal feeling: I could want to do this forever, just gliding across surface of a frozen lake.
Or not, as practicalities, the very mortal needs of food and shelter, call me away before I’m ready to go in.
Images Above: ACEO’s, paper varies, done with sharpie markers.
Below: There are Cracks in My Universe, ACEO, on Grey Stonehenge paper, black and red pen, & sharpie markers.
Obviously, I write these posts at different times, and in fact, the words were gleaned from two different journal entries from the last two weeks. But here’s where it gets interesting. In between the two opportunities to skate (we had snow and rain in between times), the aceo Cracks in My Universe appeared on the page (that’s how it feels; sometimes they just happen). And, as usual, I wondered, well, where did that come from? And of course, I can contemplate a little on it, and think it’s the tearing away of 'who we think we are’ to reveal ‘what we really are’ which will forever remain a mystery, but as I was skating across the ice, looking down into those deep dark holes, and thinking my thoughts, I realized that on a much more basic level, it was just another version of those black ice divots.
