Paying attention to glaciers.

Ah, slow.

Yes, in this day and age, slow is seen as a downer, a problem - a problem to be remedied, a trouble to be overcome.

But I just spent a little over half an hour today watching a glacier.

Now mind you, this particular glacier - although it moved at the traditional pace of it's ancient, gargantuatan, name-deserving cousins - isn't a glassy blue wonder clinging to some dizziness inspiring mountain side or at the head of a fjord in some northern latitude, no. No, this particular glacier was - nay, is - currently sliding off the metal roof at the family home. Although 'creeping' might be the better word.

But it makes you think. There's a real beauty in something like that - a couple of hundred pounds of ice and snow hanging precariously almost two feet over the drop of the eave. You can't hear it, you can barely see it come forward - but it's happening.

Much like so many things in our life, the slow ones are often ignored until the constant, snail-like pace of change amounts to something.

I got cold long before I was ready to leave the view. But then, that's the thing with glaciers - you put so much time in, and yet the moment that it calfs off into the ocean - or plummets off of the roof, as it were - takes but moments.

So although I continue to wait for the fall, and will more than likely miss it, I appreciate the lessons of the roof-glacier creeping, creeping, towards it's necessary end as a growing pile on the lawn.

And in these days of waiting, I see there's so much more to it than that. A time for reflection, a time to reconnect with myself, a time to pay attention to glaciers.