my icicle

by Elouise

winter chill
creeps through sunlit air –
icicle sparkles

There’s only one icicle. It hangs outside my bathroom window. Lonely? Maybe. Definitely an outlier, since we haven’t had a decent ice storm yet, and our gutters are almost clean.

So there it hangs, too cold to melt, though it shrinks a bit every day. Yesterday we had another deep freeze day—with more on the way.

So what’s a lone icicle to do? Nothing. Just hang there and let the sun do its work—casting rainbow colors, glistening, showing off flaws that look like the work of a master sculptor. No dripping. Just hanging there, shrinking a bit every day. Disappearing.

I don’t often emote over icicles hanging from our gutters. They’re usually growing longer by the day, sometimes too heavy to let nature take its course. So D grabs an old ax handle we keep by the front door, throws open the windows, and whacks them to the ground.

But not this little baby. It’s there just for me. A mirror of sorts. I’m too cold to melt quickly. I’m shrinking a bit every day. And it seems I’m going nowhere for now. So there’s nothing to do but hang there in all my glory, catching and reflecting every little gleam of light that comes my way.

I had a small epiphany this week. I’ve heard a lot in the last years about just ‘being’ instead of ‘doing.’ A wonderfully freeing concept–until you can’t ‘do’ so much anymore. Yet God wants me to show up every day. Just as I am. No more and no less.

So what does it mean for me to show up right now? Sometimes the most obvious things escape me. But this week I finally got it. I show up by writing! It’s so simple. I don’t have to write something in particular, but whatever comes to mind as I hang there just under the gutter. Cold, shiny, changing every day, ready to reflect rainbow colors or nothing more than the morning sky and clouds.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 28 December 2017
Photo taken by me with my iPad – sunrise, 26 December 2017