It's Time to Melt
A guest post and poem from musician, poet, bird-noticer, and climate advocate Amanda Lauricella
Friends, I’m so excited to introduce you to a fellow poet this week for what I hope is the first of many guest poetry posts here on The Perpetual Visitor: meet Amanda Lauricella, a professional musician and amateur poet, bird-noticer, climate advocate based in Madison, Wisconsin, and my dearest friend who just happens to be my sister. If you’ve joined me in the past for a virtual poetry reading, you will remember Amanda as my creative collaborator for those events, and I’m thrilled that she is joining us on the newsletter this week.
I’m sharing Amanda’s bio at the end of the post, and linking her poetry collection, Phoenix: Depicting Death and Rebirth through Seasonal Poems of an Everchanging Landscape, if you feel called to purchase a copy. I keep my own copy close by throughout the year; the collection is divided into the four seasons, and I love coming back to let her words to guide me as we cycle from winter to spring to summer to fall, again and again and again. Amanda has also included dozens of her own gorgeous photography in the book, interspersed with the poems, and what a gift it is to the reader to enjoy the striking visuals that inspire her writing. I love it, and just know you will, too.
As we meander further into March and start to see the bitter cold softening back just a bit, I asked Amanda to share a spring themed reflection and poem this week. Her words below inspired me to reflect on just how present the process of melting is in our lives. Whether it’s snow, ice, fear, or anger, the process of transformation is often marked by a gradual softening or sorts.
As the keen writer Katherine May has written, “Stop believing that force will heal you. The work of healing is slow.”
Here in Boston, the grey winter skies have relaxed into bright blue, and the sun has emerged from her slumber, shining and strong. The snow has melted and sparrows and grackles and cardinals and bluejays are singing songs they’ve rehearsed in dark. My heart feels a little more open for business on days like these.
Now that the bitter temperatures have abated, I’ve been spending more time outdoors, beyond my required walks to the catch the train. These days invite more spontaneous strolling and circuitous rambles, without the pressing need to duck inside out of the cold, lest your fingers feel like they may fall off.
Getting out every day to walk by the same plants, trees, and burgeoning flowers feels sturdy somehow. I love to notice the small, subtle changes that occur at this point in late winter. One day it’s seeing the thin green stems of the snowdrops peek out from the cold earth, and the next, it’s noticing that the bright white flowers have shown themselves, like delicate pale crowns, bringing with them the welcome news that warmth is near. If you don’t walk two days in a row, you can miss this gradual unfurling, and it can come across as sudden, sharp, and somewhat disorienting. These early snowdrop messengers seem to me a signal of safety for the other green things still sleeping beneath the soil.
“It’s safe to come out - really, it’s time,” they seem to say.
One of these days, the crocuses will be convinced enough to debut their purples, whites, and golds in all their glory. Until then, I’ll put one foot in front of the other and do my best to sit with my impatience and find something beautiful in the process.
If we let it, nature can show us the way, quiet and unconcerned by clocks.
It’s been with wonder that I’ve watched the giant piles of snow and stubborn, slick patches of ice succumb to sunnier skies this past week. We, too, take time to become someone different. Human beings need time to melt, too.
One breath at a time, one step, a pause.
Melt.
Gentle go we.
Breathe, step, pause; melt.
Breathe, step, pause; melt.
Nature won’t be rushed. And being an inextricable part of nature, neither will we, as much as we insist on getting to the finish line now.
Take good care of your sweet selves, and I’m looking forward to being back in your inbox next week for the Spring Equinox.
I live in the middle of a city that is surrounded by two lakes, both of which freeze over completely every winter. There is even an annual festival that includes a 5K run ON the frozen lake (which always stresses me out—perhaps I’ve watched that scene from Little Women when Amy falls through the ice too much). Needless to say, winters here are characterized by ice.
Winter’s icy cold has always represented rigidity for me. My winter walks are full of so much more muscle tension than any other time of the year—perhaps an involuntary physical response to keep myself warm or prevent myself from slipping on the icy sidewalk. It feels like when the world is frozen, Mother Earth is holding her breath, waiting for a safer time to exhale. It makes me hold my breath too.
But something miraculous happens every year at this time—I see the first bits of gentle running water trickle along the shore. First only in small areas here and there, and then across the vastness of the entire lake. I exhale for the first time in months. Finally, finally, finally. I can’t help but feel a sort of permission to lay my winter burdens to rest for good.
Below is a poem I wrote on an early spring walk around this time in 2023, along with a photo from that walk of the shore of Lake Monona days after it had begun to thaw. It was a heavenly sight after over three months of ice and even longer of snow and cold.
Those initial spring walks remind me of how much I have needed the world to melt. I don’t realize how heavy I have felt until the lightness of an early spring stroll makes me see. It’s been hard—harder than I’ve realized—to not feel that kind of exhale in so long.
I have been holding my breath in more ways than one for awhile now. I have been holding onto various limiting beliefs about myself, desires to change other people’s perspectives, and an overall sense of doubt that things will work out in the ways I hope they will. Can you relate to some of these? If not, what sort of ideas or beliefs have been keeping you “frozen” for too long?
As I see the shore begin to finally melt, I’m giving myself permission to melt too. It’s time.
Melt
What a reliefto finally see the sea soften
from icy solid
to soft and gentle liquid,
greeting us on the shore
splashing the rocks below,
as if to tell us:
it’s all over—
you can melt now too.
Amanda Lauricella is a professional musician and amateur poet, bird-noticer, and climate advocate based in Madison, Wisconsin. Her passion for the earth led her to publish her first collection of poems in 2022 entitled, “Phoenix: Depicting Death and Rebirth through Seasonal Poems of an Everchanging Landscape.” This collection depicts the beauty of impermanence through poems of autumn, winter, spring, and summer, all inspired by images of the ever-changing natural world taken in and around Madison.
Amanda received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Voice Performance in 2021 with a minor in Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently working as an Adjunct Professor of Voice and Diction at Carroll University and Beloit College. She is also a freelance soprano and has most recently performed with the educational outreach company, Opera for the Young. Additionally, she volunteers with 350 Wisconsin, a nonprofit organization that works to make transformational progress toward environmental justice and solving the climate crisis.