Freeze is Beyond Functional

Musings from the cold wilds of the North.

Welp. It’s been a minute. Instead of lengthy explanations and apologies, which I feel I need to give and don’t know how and will never write here if I think about them too long, I’m just going to offer up this piece from today. Thank you.

Since we ourselves are nature, it is no wonder that we use the external landscapes we experience to describe the nature of our inner terrain. We cannot speak of love, or hunger, or longing without internalizing the metaphors of the lives that seemingly live outside of us. Love as a bloom, a flower, a blossom, perhaps in spring, or bore out in the wet, dripping heat of summer; hunger as in a bear, ravenous with the greed of a raven; the wistful longing of a tide drawn inexorably toward shore. 

We cannot speak of loss, of depression, or sadness without the same employment of literary relational device. We speak of depths, valleys, oceans. Waves crashing down on us as we try to keep our heads above water. To know the darkness of night and loss and the shining light of hope on the horizon. We could not know the hillocks and hollows of our own minds without the traversing of those landscapes we call home; their peaks and valleys a mirror for our own. 

I find myself, then, in a state of functional freeze. It’s not a new state to me, but rather an old one. A worn and bushwhacked trail from childhood, so oft traversed, the tracks have turned to ruts in the patterns of my mind, something I fall into almost unwittingly. I am overwhelmed. Burnt out. Awash in anticipation, suffused with the feeling that just around the next bend, the other shoe will drop. It is a sort of haunting of oneself, functional freeze. We stand, terrified, in the corners of our mind, while we, ourselves, look on from some transparent block of ice, able to watch in horror and yet not release ourselves from this strange icy prison. We become spectral to ourselves, unable to take part in our own lives. It is, perhaps, more pronounced for those of us on the spectrum. Caught between that proto-indo-european root spek-, to observe, and the latin specter, an appearance or vision of horror. Yes. We observe ourselves with horror, seemingly unable to intervene, frozen. 

Frozen; still and static and without motion. As winter begins to wrap her icy tendrils around my Northern world, I keep finding examples of frozen in the landscapes around me. Examples that are not still or static, not broken or wrong, but are wonders of the nature within and without us. Inside the soil, ribbons of moisture form ice that pushes against gravity, lifting pebbles from their engrained places forming patterns in the muck; ice needles, or so they’re called. The slow drip, drip of an errant rivulet falling from a ledge creates an improbable stalactite of ice, its tip so sharp that it might puncture my skin if it did not melt around my warmth; icicle. In the fields where the cows graze, their whiskers tipped with frost, wooden poles driven four feet deep into the earth are pushed and lifted from within the ground; frost heaves. And companionship found in another animal; a deer, suddenly alert to my presence, freezes and stares at me as she anticipates the next moves she might make to protect herself and her young; deer in the headlights. 

These are not trauma responses, or not just, these are structures woven from the very fabric of life and as essential to it. These frozen states are beautiful, powerful; there is a sharpness to them, an almost violence of upheaval, a honing of an edge. They are lifting great weights from soil, pushing up stone and rock, and accumulating slowly. They are the realization of slow movements over time. Some, like the ice needles, move slowly in a span of hours. Others, like glaciers, over eons. But in them we can see their power to disrupt, to scarify, to heave and bring forth, our own potential to be born out of the cold. 

Glaciers move through landscapes across deep time, scarring the earth, and leaving in their erosive wake fertile valleys where life proliferates. I think to the jagged and rugged shorelines of Maine, the fjords of Norway, the jutting peaks of the Tetons, glaciers carving and shaping, bringing with them sediment, minerals, and the ingredients for future fecundity. Atop the ocean, ice floes insulate great bodies of water, allowing ocean life to thrive beneath their surface. The very nature of ice something of a conundrum, whereby, in a surprise to most of the elements, when water freezes it becomes less dense (instead of more), allowing it to float, to stay above the depths. In the sky, a raindrop falls and turns to ice, to snowflake, becoming a small crystal, the only one known as itself in the annals of time. 

No, I don’t know how this freeze I’ve come to loathe all my life takes up arms with the motionless, the stagnant, in modern therapy speak. Freeze is the power to lift, to transform, to occupy a space of transcorporeality throughout thick time. It is the slow movement of growth, perhaps not seen in an instant, but realized over a cold night, a long winter, an epoch. 

And it’s clear to me that as the Northern climes submit to the early days of frost and freeze and snow and ice, that sometimes we need that insulation to blanket the depths of our emotions, need the slow accumulation that allows ribbons of water turned ice to lift us out of the muck, need the glacial power to completely break and build the very soil of our being back into fertile ground, becoming honed by the slow drip, drip as we fall off the ledge of our own being, to form again. 

So in this place, where I formerly believed that I was trapped both within and without myself, is now a space of something else. Perhaps I am in a state of matter that allows me to float, against all odds, at a time that I otherwise might have drowned in the deluge. I am crystalline, able to reflect and bend light, when before it could only pass through. And like the matter phases of water, I will be liquid and in flow again, when the thaw comes. But as I look across the hoar frost of morning, the world prickled around me, gooseflesh raised on my skin by the icy wind, I am not sure I am in such a hurry to thaw as much as I am to remember what it really means to freeze.