A Memory of Ice
I stand, my spiked feet firmly gripping the giant below. Glancing up, I see the black and white surface drip, I hear faint cracks as the ice gently warms in the afternoon sun. Below, the trickle of meltwater echoes up from the crevasse below. It’s been a long and rewarding hike. I think back on what brought me to this remarkable scene. Who would ever have thought that attending a conference about dreams would lead me to a pilgrimage for peace in Iona, Scotland. In that quiet contemplation, I realized that graduate school was my next step and from there, a dissertation arose. My focus on the melting of the polar ice caps from a depth psychological perspective would bring me all the way to Sòlheim glacier in southern Iceland. “From Dreams to Glaciers and Back Again” could be the title of my unwritten memoir.
Each step on this icy surface reminds me of all the people along my life’s path: my fellow pilgrims and cohort members, dream workers, activists, friends, and family. Deep beneath the pocked and scarred grey surface, hints of brilliant blue echo the melancholy of this place. These landscapes seem timeless but sadly, in our warming world, they all are quickly subject to the passage of time. On our walk to get to this glacier, before the hike even began, we passed markers along the way. Yellow markers that record where the walls of the glacier once stood.
The thought occurred to me, if this is a glacial pace, we will need to vastly re-think our vocabulary. Year after year the spacing between the yellow signs grow. Year after year, the glacier is receding more and more. This is a place of death, of dying. No matter what, there are places that have already been lost that will never be seen again. Even if, by some twist of fate, we are able to curb, correct, or counter the damage we have done, this glacier will never be the same again in our lifetime. As I traverse this tenuous surface, I feel part of me die as well.
I stand in this place of loss, this feeling of grief. As I look over the massive field of ice around me, the lake below, the hot rays piercing the cloudy sky above, I cannot process all that I am taking in. Just then, our guide calls us to him, grounds me. We gather, all of us in this remote place, world-weary from travel, physically exhausted from the hike. Our guide begins to take a small core from the ice. As he drills into a soft patch, a small, clear cylinder pushes up from beneath the surface. The tool breaks the core into small wafers and we are each given our piece.
I hold my small piece as our guide explains to us how old this ice is. It is the product of a millennia or more, snowfall compacted upon snowfall, pressed and solidified. The deep depths of this cryosphere holds the memory of our earth’s atmosphere. Climactic data solidified and able to be studied, a glimpse into our planet’s past is held in these compact crystals. The more it melts, volumes of that important record are lost. I feel as though I am standing at the library of Alexandria as it burns, so much knowledge burning away and no way to save it all.
Our guide, as an example, places his ice on his tongue. We each, in turn, as if at a holy communion, raise our wafers to our mouths. I feel the cold first. My tongue recoils and my mouth starts to water in revolt. Then the taste comes. The water is as fresh and crisp and clear as any I have ever experienced. Perhaps it was my thirst from the hike, maybe it is the coldness of it, but I can taste the essence of ice. I can feel the melting trickle down my throat, meltwater mirroring the murmurs in the moulin below.
I feel the melting ice within as I watch it without.
I begin to weep.
As the ice melts all around me, this melt begins to thaw something inside. I sit with the death of this place and I know that something in me must die too. My want to return to “normal,” to go back to being unaware, unconnected from the world and its many hurts and problems begins to fade. As the ice melts in the world around us, as icebergs calve and crack, I imagine myself doing the same. The part of my life and my view of the world that no longer serve calve away, they die to become something new. They are reborn.
In this newness, this gift of life from the echoing death, I find a path to hope. Not a backward-looking hope to return to what I have always known or the way that things have always been. Instead, a renewed hope that holds within it a memory, like the ice. This hope does not keep me stuck, it does not rely on ways long dead or dying. This hope is a hope of the ice, for the ice; one that says, even if this ice is lost to the world, the lessons it gifted will remain. This hope is one of connection and memory, of grief and love, of beauty, and pain, and sacrifice. This hope is the way forward.
I feel the last of the icy communion flow down my throat and I know. The path before us will be hard, but the sooner we acknowledge all we need to leave behind, the sooner we can start on what is ahead. If we can melt our resistance, soften the ways that are freezing us in place, make necessary sacrifices for one another and our earth, we may yet have a chance. We have to melt this ice in ourselves and by doing so, perhaps, slow the melt in our world today.
