Maria has a wonderful post at her blog, Kirkepiscatoid, on this image of an iceberg. It got me thinking and I posted the following comments below at her blog.
"Maria, you know how my brain works, I actually was fascinated by this picture and by the beauty of the undersea portion of the iceberg - the play of light and shadow. I am always thinking about the layers of truth and reality and for me this is more of a three dimensional representation of what I often picture as layers on layers.
I hadn't really thought about icebergs rolling as they change shape and melt. That image had me thinking again about the falseness of humanity's concept of time.
In our imposed sense of linear time on the planet - the change in this iceberg as it melts into the greater source - seems darn near geologic in it's pace.
Meditate if you will on an imagined time lapse film of this massive berg melting and rolling and returning to the source in all it's natural beauty and at a pace more consistent with God.
Our lives are but brief flashes of energy as we pop into and out of the physical world. Our melting and rolling and gradual return to the source should be imagined as equally beautiful and natural.
Peace."
I think it was Maria (or C.S. Lewis) that shared with me an image of a bowl of water floating on the ocean as a metaphor for our existence - at death the bowl dissolves. That too is what has floated to the surface (sorry) while pondering this iceberg image.
What do you see? Is this a threatening image, an image of Leviathan, as Maria indicates? I can't help thinking that an overindulgence of Titantic history and lore (along with Kate and Leonardo) has marked icebergs with their stamp of danger (I must admit to never completely relaxing in the ocean thanks to Jaws).
I suppose I simply see awesome Nature. I feel the same way watching video footage of tornadoes or standing on my porch during a thunderstorm. This is more what it seems Maria was getting at. Now I think I have to go back and reread her post again. I encourage you to bookmark her blog and visit frequently.
Peace.
"Maria, you know how my brain works, I actually was fascinated by this picture and by the beauty of the undersea portion of the iceberg - the play of light and shadow. I am always thinking about the layers of truth and reality and for me this is more of a three dimensional representation of what I often picture as layers on layers.
I hadn't really thought about icebergs rolling as they change shape and melt. That image had me thinking again about the falseness of humanity's concept of time.
In our imposed sense of linear time on the planet - the change in this iceberg as it melts into the greater source - seems darn near geologic in it's pace.
Meditate if you will on an imagined time lapse film of this massive berg melting and rolling and returning to the source in all it's natural beauty and at a pace more consistent with God.
Our lives are but brief flashes of energy as we pop into and out of the physical world. Our melting and rolling and gradual return to the source should be imagined as equally beautiful and natural.
Peace."
I think it was Maria (or C.S. Lewis) that shared with me an image of a bowl of water floating on the ocean as a metaphor for our existence - at death the bowl dissolves. That too is what has floated to the surface (sorry) while pondering this iceberg image.
What do you see? Is this a threatening image, an image of Leviathan, as Maria indicates? I can't help thinking that an overindulgence of Titantic history and lore (along with Kate and Leonardo) has marked icebergs with their stamp of danger (I must admit to never completely relaxing in the ocean thanks to Jaws).
I suppose I simply see awesome Nature. I feel the same way watching video footage of tornadoes or standing on my porch during a thunderstorm. This is more what it seems Maria was getting at. Now I think I have to go back and reread her post again. I encourage you to bookmark her blog and visit frequently.
Peace.
3 comments:
Me, I'm the perennial optimist, and so I see nothing but a magical image that immediately reminded me of God and faith. You can see a little and you can have your thoughts about it, but the deep mystical truth is much larger, much more fascinating, much harder to access - and yet the greatest prize there is.
I LOVE that photo and I hadn't seen it before!
I could use that to meditate and pray for hours.
All this talk of ice bergs and the passage of time, etc. caused me to reflect back on my first visit to Glacier Bay, AK. The ship floated about a mile off the edge of a huge glacier. Periodically, we could see an iceberg calving from the glacier. A ranger from the National Park Service explained that the frozen water that formed the new iceberg had fallen as snow some 225 - 250 years ago. From then until now, the snow became ice, and the ice was packed under pressure until it took on a bluish color. Slowly that portion of ice moved down until it reached the ocean and calved. So here I stood watching an iceberg calf made of snow flakes that were falling about the same time as other snow flakes fell on General Washington and his men at Vally Forge. I stood there feeling of wonder, as a child might, and a humbling sense of being nothing more than a speck of matter in the greater cosmos.
I think "awesomeness" often provokes a dual reaction. Your description of the thunderstorm on the porch is a perfect example. I am that way about tornadoes in the distance. I find myself both captivated by their beauty, and fearful of their powers of destruction. But to see the duality requires a certain level of detachment, and I think in the case of icebergs, we probably HAVE been culturally "Titanicized" a bit.
That is exactly what happened in my thoughts on Leviathan. Our cultural gut screams, "Sea monster!" and what I discovered, as my post evolved, I was going, "Naw...it's just BIG. Big simply has "potential for scariness." I found myself detaching from the fearful aspects of Leviathan, and being more captivated by its size and power.
Ignatian spiritual exercises are like that. Notice your "gut reaction", sit with it a little...then detach and explore once that gut feeling has passed.
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