Prompt #2: Phases of Matter

11/14/2022

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As the pandemic winter begins to thaw, we might consider how our experience resembles one of the three phases of matter. Are we stuck where we sit, wedged solidly into a corner like an ill-fitting chair? Do our emotions overwhelm us without warning like a flash-flood's liquid panic? Or are our souls numb, every craze line and crevice filled in with the inescapable air of exhaustion?

We are who we are: irreducible. Like atomic matter, we also experience ourselves in ways which phase and shift. During our transition out of the psychic and physical restraints of Covid, we can ask ourselves what phase of matter we might become. Solid, liquid, or gas?

Solids hold their shape with authenticity.
Liquids take the shape of their containers revealing the contours of relationships.
Gases fill spaces with invisible presence, a subtle persuasion influencing life.
In the case of ice, water, and steam, HEAT serves as the catalyst
transforming one phase of matter into the next.
We can ask: what catalyses us?

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5 Comments

Madison Mignola

11/15/2022 10:19:42 pm

1. Think about what a change of phase might look like for you. What phase best describes your experience right now? Moving from solid to liquid to gas AND/OR from gas to liquid to solid, which direction do you sense you're headed in? Does this surprise you?

I’ve spent the past nine months feeling far away from myself. I, too, bloom in June, but right now I am still withering from fall and newly thawing to adjustments of winter ice. I’m trying to actively tell myself a different story, to become an unconditional observer of my own experience. It is easy to start with the body. I’ve just come in from smoking a cigarette on my porch. The drizzle was sprinkling onto my cheeks and my scarf was nuzzling all the warm blood pulsing through my neck. Being a diligent observer of such things reminds me that I am, indeed, turning from the gaseous, far away version of myself to the solid, experiencing one. I read something recently that stated: “It is okay for me to take my time.” I painted the phrase onto a piece of paper and taped it to my wall. It is okay for me to take my time. I am a collection of phases, a force of humanness that will keep the skeptics and scientists confuddled. I can change directly from a gas to solid. I can do it in an instant. Watch me.

2. Describe qualities in yourself you would like to recover, restore, or develop in terms of the characteristics of the three phases of matter. Will you find solid gems of inspiration as your well of imagination thaws out? Does it change your experience (if at all) to describe your life in the same terms as we do cosmic matter?

The three phases of matter are not at all as mutually exclusive as I just put. You could argue that I had just equated gaseousness to a fog. And that is true. I was the fog. The fog was everywhere. But there is not just fog. There is the space to walk through it, to have the wisps of it follow your body around, if only for an instant. There is the space for anything, in a fog. The biggest love of my life so far was just like the sun on a foggy day. It is so rare to be able to see the full outline of that crisp sun in a nothing-but-blue sky. You can only do so through fog. You’re in a car full of people driving somewhere, and someone gasps “Look! You can see the outline of the sun!” We can thank the fog for this romance.
But turning from gas to solid is no idle business. I’ve spent many months slowly churning this gaseous stew, my wooden spoon not meeting any resistance. I’ve been wondering what it is the world wants from me. Does it even want anything? I’ve realized the better question is, what do I want from myself? And how do I get it? I’m still coming to the conclusion that a good place to start is solidifying my foundation.
Being a gas meant that I didn’t have to glaringly take up space and stand by anything. I could be everywhere and nowhere all at once. I could hide in my cloud, even when other people were talking to me, because I was everything and nothing to them. Coming to terms with solidifying, and deciding that I want to commit to it... I’m still scared. Becoming a solid thing, showing myself to you and the possibility of you taking my new weight in your hands, holding it, smoothing your thumbs over grated down parts meant that you could discard me. You could finally feel me in your hands and say, “No, I do not want this” and hear the thud of me hit the ground. And I won’t have any of that liquid business, either, the molding to whatever shape the container is. I understand there is beautiful metaphor in that regard, but I think I might take the anonymity of the fog and the active self absorption of the solid instead. The liquid form may be the phase I trust the least. Although, feeling the soothing burn of mint tea going down my throat is an allure that doesn’t even have to try.
I’m sitting here thanking whatever power there is that I will never be damned to one phase of matter. That I am Sisyphus’s breath, sweat and rock.

3. Change of phase requires a catalyst. What catalyst do you think you might need in order to shift phase - get unstuck, hold your own, know how you feel, deeply breathe life in? Do you see that catalyst operating in the lives of people you know? How do you imagine getting a hold of some of it for yourself?

Well, it's funny, really. I started going to a therapist a month or two ago and she specializes in somatic therapy. I’ve always intellectualized my emotions, which she told me was a way to avoid just simply feeling them. Being with them. I resisted at first, because she’ll ask me where the anxiety is in my body, along with -- What color is it? What phase of matter is it? It felt silly to label my imposter syndrome or fears of ordinaryness as buzzing bees in my chest and a bubbling boiling pot of silver water in my stomach. I told her things my cr

Karen Jessee

1/15/2023 05:44:22 pm

"It is okay for me to take my time." I painted the phrase onto a piece of paper and taped it to my wall.

This is VERY good advice! To bring understanding into the realm of the physical, to "make real" with paint and paper (with writing!), literally on the concreteness of a wall--this is an exercise for not pinging around in the ether but becoming solid with every moment's glance in the kitchen.

Being able to shift phase in a lightening flash from the vapor of mind to body awareness is like having a super power! "Look at me, Ma! Hands!"

11/20/2022 08:50:53 pm

Before Covid, I seemed like a complicated person, always moving inside and outside myself like ice clinking stylishly in a glass of water or hot water boiling, belching steam. The three phases of matter described me perfectly--all three in flux all the time. I was vibrant. I was confusing. Call it what you will.

Then came the lockdown. Almost everything in my life slowed to a stop. No long trips to the grocery store and pharmacy, no "hello-how-are-you"s that mean so much more than we thought. No coffee shop dates, no going to the movies, no visiting friends at home, no having friends visit me.

The whole experience has lasted over two years. I dropped into a phase of being stilled water, pooled the way blood pools in my feet if I stand for too long and begin to feel nauseous. I have to lie down. During these years of Covid, my symbolic water pooled so often, I took to lying down quite a lot. Now, I am determined to come out of this gelatinous pseudo-death and stand up again.

What's going to get me moving? My instinct for needing people. Even with a trendy case of social anxiety, I still feel compelled to put myself "out there:" think thoughts, feel feelings, do deeds. My impulse to be part of a community is such a force, you could call it catalytic. It might just be uncomfortably agitating. Whatever it is, I feel myself flowing and taking shape again, at the same time, all at once.

Nell Kriesberg

11/26/2022 05:13:44 pm

Such an interesting question, because we ourselves live by blurring boundaries between phases of matter: air, water and solid. And if we ourselves weren’t pretty completely made up of permeable membranes, we wouldn’t be alive at all. (Nor would any other living creature for that matter..) Of course we can relate this to Covid: aerosol transmission of a virus is obvious, the interference with the oxygen transfer in our lungs….you got it. To answer the blog question: what phase of matter am I, now? I don’t think, all things considered, that I (we) are exactly solid, with climate change, probably that time has passed. But liquid, e.g. water, yes! That is the ‘best’ in a weird way; again, relating it to our blog and Covid recovery, recovery in general, how water is the core of biological bodies. (I’m betting everyone reading this can immediately think of ways to apply this to Covid..) And we’ve had to work at being liquid these past couple of years; that is, incredibly flexible, keeping moving, no matter what. Solid is hard to work with, solid doesn’t react well to change: solids splinter, break. Air is impossible to hold on to and given how everything is changing around us all the time, I don’t feel thinking of myself and my friends as air… works. But liquid: yes, we are all trying to be more and more flexible in how we think, how we interpret and how we react. (Terrible pun: wrapping one’s mind around something works best as liquid….) I feel ‘liquidy’ in that I try to move over the rough places with relationships, with my own expectations. I keep trying to make peace with having a day of ‘no accomplishment’ because being alive, drinking, is enough given the state of things. Trying to keep shape-changing in an instant, changing direction or speed, instead of holding solid to what I thought yesterday. (Of course, I refuse to have the word ‘flow’ in this comment. :)

Melissa

11/29/2022 07:34:54 am

Love in all its many forms and shades of flavors is my catalyst of choice. I reach up from the bottom of a deep dry well toward the promising light of love. Love is a mystical fire, eternally burning, sometimes invisibly, sometimes infinitesimally like a distant star, always always burning bright. Oh love rain down on me with gentle drops, a gentle massage. Soften the solid ground of my heart into a muddy mess where seeds can sprout.

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