I went to the opera a couple of weeks ago and was so blown away by the scene of Lucia's hand dragging across a fogged-up window while her brother and lover fought below her, so blown away that I didn't know how to talk about it, the visual viscerality. I could dissect it for its symbology, its metaphor, how it became a fulcrum, the pivot point for the rest of the opera. I could write a whole dissertation on the movement, the tracks, each moment memorialized as the next unfolded on top of it... But no. It was glowing red, and I felt in my spine. I felt it. That is enough. That is everything.

And in that moment I remembered what I meant when I first laid claim to being an artist, what it felt like—the unnamed thing coursing through me. Before I cared about theory or the postmodern secret nods of artists to each other behind the closed curtains of their public faces, before I knew the pasted on smiles of openings, the things we were supposed to be talking about. The language and slight of hand that proved the point of the dissection that made what I had to say worth hearing, the worlds of prestige and tangled meaning.

I have been dog-paddling, forgotten entirely that I am a swimmer, grasping and scrambling to stay afloat, getting nowhere. It takes a willingness to stretch out long, point forward while looking down, have a little faith in muscle and breath and buoyancy. If—instead of all of this furious trying—I can let my muscle memory take over, I think I just might remember the cool meditative rhythm of my stroke: reach, pull, kick, breathe. Maybe after a little while inertia will take hold again, and movement will come more easily than the swirl of my own thoughts.

The snow is melting and has become a sea of slush. I tiptoe and slosh and try to maintain balance. What had frozen rigid has melted in a flash and flooded everything. We weren't prepared, aren't prepared.

It is like that. When the ice melts I don't know what to do with everything that is suddenly liquid and flowing. It is moving and bigger than anything I can corral, anything I can even pretend to try to control. It makes its own rivers, forges its own paths, carves ravines into anything between it and where its headed.

My feet slop through the muck on the streets. Everything is slick and soft and yielding.

Last week in yoga, my instructor had us spend the whole class on backbends, spoke of the metaphorical implications of the pose: baring your belly, committing with effort and intention to vulnerability. She told us how, in her personal life, vulnerability was the most anxiety-producing place—bare yourself and then freeze and hold your breath. It is like that. I step forward into open air; I do it every time. I am not unafraid; I am terrified, but I do it every time. I take risks; it is the only thing that feels worth it, but I bare myself and then I freeze and hold my breath. I cling and I gasp and I hope, and I lose my suppleness, my ability to move and breathe with ease. So we spent the hour bending back, baring our bellies, pushing evermore skyward, opening, opening... and breathing, moving in the place of vulnerability.

It is a muscle that needs work, a practice we could all tend to with more diligence, more grace, with more give and forgive. Even writing the words here is me stepping forward into the wind, and I feel my breath catch in my throat, the beginnings of steeling myself, the rigidity creeping in and up. So, deep breath, return to the slick soft slush of the fiercely wildly melting snow and ice. It knows not where it's going, but it's going, and no fear or self-consciousness can slow its pace or block its path.