The trauma that freezes us
Lessons from ice
It is always hard to choose which session to go to at a conference, and Socialism 2024 was no exception. There were just too many great speakers available to me but when I saw Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's name on the program there was no question. The fact is that Simpson could speak about a random word she found in the dictionary and I would go, but at this time she was there to talk about her upcoming book, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, which will be published in April 2025 by Haymarket in the US and Penguin Random House in Canada. The presentation was fascinating, taking us through all the things that nibi teaches us when we think with water in all its forms. The vastness of nibi's work. The way that snowflakes form bonds which shape the snowpack. The first thing a snowflake does is form bonds with other snowflakes. Everything Simpson said felt important and profound.
Then a Palestinian mother asked a question during the Q&A that stayed with me, that haunts me. I can't stop thinking about it. She wanted to know what ice could teach her about the trauma that freezes her. She described being frozen, unable to move. I heard from so many Palestinians those three days from panels to conversations, all of them sharing the vocabulary of intractable violence, watching genocide thunder over their homes. But the language was no longer dominated by defiance and anger. It was retreating inward, this active genocide being livestreamed into our homes is over 300 days old. The longer, slow genocide we have somehow, inexplicably, gotten used to, more than 70 years. They feel brittle. Cold. Frigid. Nipping. Algid. Frosted. Encrusted. Calcified. Bitter. Cutting.
Frozen.
Leanne talked about her children being water for her in those moments, opening the possibility of movement and thaw, nurture and care. The potential of finding life in the midst of a frozen landscape. A promise of spring ephemerals that bloom amidst the snow. But I can't stop thinking about that question. What can ice teach her, a Palestinian mother, about the trauma that freezes her. That is important context because she asked the question from her position as a Palestinian mother and I cannot imagine the depth of that freezing.
I thought about the way that ice protects the beings beneath it from thaw/freeze cycles. It forms a cover for land and water that reflects excess heat back into space. That is one reason why the Arctic is colder than the equator. More of the heat from the sun is reflected back by the protective ice and snow cover and so it stays colder than other places.
Ice is expansive, extending beyond the reach of water, it covers the vulnerable edges of shorelines from the erosion of winter winds. I thought about the snow that blankets the landscape around me, tiny trails becoming visible in the spring and revealing how mice and other small animals moved safely beneath the snow. I think of winter, a time for telling and reading stories snug by a fire. My boys think about hiking and skiing, winter camping. Being frozen can be protective, restful.
But ice is also destructive.
The expansiveness of ice is why you can't freeze yourself and be unthawed when they find a cure for whatever ails you. The water in your cells expands when it freezes and destroys the cell walls. Frostbite is an injury that results from such freezing, usually fingers and toes, eyes, ears, mouth and nose as the song says. Mild frostbite, a nibble more than a bite, can be healed. Your body replacing the damaged cells over the course of weeks or months but severe frostbite causes permanent damage. The longer the pieces of you exposed to the cold stay exposed, stay frozen, the less likely your body will be able to heal itself. When my middle son lived in Iqaluit his daily weather report in winter included the number of minutes he could safely have uncovered skin.
Ice falls from the sky, hail the size of golf balls or larger causes damage to crops and cars. It happens most frequently during thunderstorms when, so my recollection of 6th grade science goes, warm and cold systems come up against each other. Warm, moist air rushes upwards as it collides with a cold front which creates high winds and towering clouds. I once sat with my family at a picnic table in South Dakota watching such storm clouds. In one part of the sky, not too far from where we sat eating our roadside chicken, these dark clouds formed a rotating circle, something I had never seen before. I sent a photo of it to a friend whose cousin was meeting us later that day at Wounded Knee and she sent a terse reply. Get out of there.
When the warm, moist air rises too far it can't hold onto the water it carries anymore and releases it in the form of rain, the torrential downpours that often come with thunderstorms. If the cold front is very cold, or the warm air rises too far, hail begins to form on the way up. Yes, you read that correctly. The freezing begins during the updraft, while the warm air is trying to find a way past the mass of cold air in its way. The hail falls when it becomes too heavy, continuing to grow as it falls, picking up speed. The thunderstorms that produce hail are often greater than 10km high. The shopping mall near my house is 9km away. It takes me about 15 minutes to drive there.
And what happens when that ice melts?
Freshet is the water that come from melting snow and ice. It is life giving. The water soaks into the ground, forms rivulets that become creeks which feed rivers and lakes. The ground warms up and readies itself for the roots and seeds that, after winter months spent resting and saving their energy, absorb that water and push their shoots upwards into the warmth of the sun. Salmon and trout will use these waters to move upstream to their spawning grounds.
But if the ground is still frozen, if the snow and ice melt too quickly or are accompanied by heavy rain the resulting water rushes past the land where seeds and roots stay frozen below ground, carrying topsoil with it. This flooding rampaging water becomes catastophic, impacting migration patterns, destroying ecosystems, and every spring children drown in the creeks suddenly swollen beyond recognition.
Microbes live in glacial ice. They live in and on top of all forms of ice, but glacial ice whose life is counted in millenia rather than months, contains life from a long ago world. And that ice is melting too. Not only does glacial ice melt mean less ice to reflect the heat back to the sun and contribute to a warming planet but melting glaciers reveal secrets they were never meant to tell. This is the stuff of horror movies, ancient pathogens released on an unready world. Relatives we no longer have any relationship with, have no capacity to protect ourselves from. The Tibetan Plateau alone has some 900 never-before-seen species of microbes including bacteria, algae, archea, and fungi. The diversity is astonishing. We have no way of knowing what might be dangerous and what is benign, but that's the problem. We don't know.
These microbes won't stay in Tibet. They will ride freshets like an army of microscopic Paddle to the Sea down rivulets to the creeks that feed rivers and lakes and then out to the ocean where all life eventually goes to be picked up by the air and carried, warm and moist, until they collide with a colder system from the north, rising and rising only to fall to earth in frozen golfballs.
Borders are so stupid. What extraordinary hubris to think we can draw lines on a map and control any of this. Nibi doesn't care about our borders.
Ice has so much to teach us about the trauma that freezes us.
Freezing can be protective. It stops us from reacting too quickly, mindlessly lashing out in grief and rage. It contains us and settles us down, gives us time to listen to the stories that provide us with context and a larger picture of where we may yet go. Stories help us remember how big everything is and provide a path we can follow. The vast geography of story and our own small part in it, which does not minimize or reduce our pain but rather connects us to others who share that pain in ways that are different and similar. Moving through that frozen land, everything is hushed. I understand why my children love it so much, the softness of it it, the way it captures and dampens sound so we can truly listen. Have you ever noticed how loud your breath is in the winter? Think about how rarely we just listen to ourselves breathe. Put your hand on your chest and remember that you can breathe. Being frozen allows us to be completely present and yet safe. We thaw at the right time, when others are ready to receive us and the work of nurturing new life can begin in warmth and care.
But the freezing trauma spoken into that room by a Palestinian mother. That is the freezing of death and harm at the cellular level. That is the destruction of desperate attempts at escape becoming hailstones carrying microbial passengers raining indiscriminate devastation. When that trauma inevitably thaws, because it always does, what is released, unleashed? What ancient aches are called out from the glaciers of generational trauma when it finally gives way? When it calves off into the ocean and rides the currents to unwary locales.
How do we prepare for that? What level of care can we create in our communities to stem that flow, to immunize against the wakening grief that has been contained and controlled for so many years.
Nibi is an ancient friend, a relative who measures its lifespan in numbers that boggle the mind. Did you know that much of the water on earth is older than the sun? That it formed in space on tiny dust particles and comes from the formation of the solar system itself? Interstellar ice became as much as half the water on our planet. It formed glaciers and oceans, rivers and tears. It runs beneath our feet in acquifers that took millenia to form and allows the desert to bloom. There is so much that it knows, so many stories it has heard and holds in its depths. What if we listened to it?
What can ice teach us about the trauma that freezes us?
Thanks for reading. And welcome new subscriber Melissa and friend with benefits, Jonathan. Most of the blogposts are free, occasionally there is paid content because paid subscribers help me get to conferences and buy the books that power this show, but just sharing this email with friends or posting about it on social media helps too!
I am hard at work at book #2 which grew from a series of podcast conversations I had a couple of years ago. You can listen to them, most of them were released on podcast format, or just watch the twitch stream that is still linked. It's due to be released in fall 2025 so watch for more details about THAT as they come available. All that being said, thank you so much for your patience and I hope to be publishing here more frequently now that the heavy lifting phase is complete and we're into edits and revisions. There's a big pile of books stacked up in my "write about this" pile.
If you want to come and see/hear me there are two great opportunities coming up!
September 22-24
Nevertheless She Preached is a conference in Austin, Texas that is "a radical gathering for faith leaders, activists, creatives, and spiritual entrepreneurs" I spoke at last year. There is a virtual option available this year and the theme is "Liberate: Imagining a Faith Decolonized" with a specific eye towards Palestine and Palestinian liberation. I'll be talking about the tower of Babel and what it can teach us about the things we build. Use the code NSPKrawec to get 10% off on in person or virtual tickets!
If you're in Winnipeg I'm going to be at the University there on October 4th. From 10-11:15 I'll be at 108 St. John's College, Fort Garry Campus for a discussion about Becoming Kin and in the afternoon, from 1:30 - 3:30 we'll be in the same room for a creative writing workshop called A Handful of Mud. Contact chrrman@umanitoba.ca
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