From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

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.