Time and Glaciers ...

Today cruising the headlines, and even picking up a recent issue of National Geographic, I found several articles about the retreating glaciers around the world, and the possibile connection that has to global warning ... Now, while it would be tempting to launch a rant about global warning, and the dangers it represents that's not where my heart lies today ... Besides, my words would ring hollow later when I hop in my van and tear off on some errand ... thereby adding to the crisis ...

But where my heart lies today is in reflecting on standing on the ice of the Assiniboine Glacier in the Columbia Icefields last weekend ... We made a detour on the way back to Minnedosa and drove down the Icefield Parkway between Jasper and Banff ... we feasted on the vistas and we stood in awe of the majesty. Then we stopped and like tens of thousands before us took the short hike up to the toe of the glacier and stood on the ancient ice that for tens of thousands of years has carved its way through the vast valley around it ...

It was awesome to see the scale of the ice ... but it was sad to mark our journey by the concrete signs that mark where the toe was over the last 120 or so years ... each marker farther along the path marking an inevitable and seemingly unstoppable retreat of a majestic and powerful presence ...

Glaciers are amazing things ... before them lie acres and acres of crushed gravel and rock, carried for miles within their icy core and left strewn across the horizon as the ice melts ... the power with which they move and carve and change the landscape is nothing short of breathtaking ... Standing on a rocky outcrop, polished clean and deeply scarred by tiny rocks carried in the belly of the glacier as it too years to pass over it, is simply inspiring ...

It may have taken a thousand years for the ice to cross the rocky outcropping and to leave its fingerprints scratched on the polished surface ... slowly millimetre by millimetre, the stones and rocks were pushed forward by the advancing ice. The time frame imperceptible to us, but each day, each moment there was a tiny movement ... a change ... a push forward.

Up and down the valleys ... over hills ... through steam beds ... the glaciers pushed and bulldozed and transformed the landscape, not in one life time, but over dozens ... perhaps hundreds of lifetimes ... the movement and the changes happening slowly ... but happening ...

As I stood on the glacier, I thought that sometimes that's our life ... we grow, we change, we mature, we alter our landscapes ... it may not happen quickly ... but it will and it does happen ...
It continues until one day looking back over our life we can see the altered landscape, pushed and scraped and polished by the glacier that is our life ... the valleys and hills are not the same as they once were, and we can see looking back that life is not so much the destination, but life is the journey itself ... The ups and downs are marking the moments that fill our lives ... the twists and turns are where we find our meaning ... change is part of life, and though it may not happen in our expected time frames - it WILL happen ...

Given enough time and the landscape of our lives will be altered and transformed ... that much the glaciers can teach us ... we just need to be prepared to have things happen in their time frame, NOT ours ...

A closing thought though: It is sad that something that for thousands of years has provided the water of life for valleys and rivers that flow thousands of kilometres from their souce, may one day in the life time of my children simply be gone ... but it is sadder still that we live in a world that is so busy that we collectively can't take the time to pause and to consider that loss and do something constructive to stop it ...