On Thin Ice

Fall – Week 46 – On Surface and Depth

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures – and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

The creek shows me its winter face this morning, and I cannot look away. Ice has claimed the slow places, the edges where water pools and lingers before the current pulls it onward. But the claiming is not uniform, not complete. The ice reveals itself in textures I hadn’t known to expect. Transparent as window glass in some places, where I can see straight through to the creek bed below, to stones magnified and distorted by their frozen lens. In other places, the ice blooms white as cauliflower, opaque and intricate, a garden of crystals that caught the cold and grew. And everywhere, the surface is angular, geometric, thousands of pieces fitted together like giant snowflakes, each one catching light differently, creating a mosaic of winter’s patient craft.

I watch how it firms around rocks, how it negotiates with the immovable, flowing around what it cannot overcome, finding purchase where it can. The physics of freezing are also the physics of adaptation. Water learning to be something else, something harder, while still, somehow, remaining itself. A leaf skitters across the solid surface of the creek, pushed by a cool breeze that makes my eyes water and my cheeks burn. It dances like a skater, spinning and gliding with an abandon that would have been impossible a month ago. Then, this same leaf would have been pulled into the depths, drawn by current and gravity, taken downstream, traveling onward toward some distant confluence. Now it stays on the surface, performing for no one but me, free in its constraint.

I am drawn to the edge, tempted. For a moment I think about crossing the creek, about walking where water once flowed. The ice looks inviting, solid enough to hold me. I place a toe at the edge of the stream where the ice has thickened. The crack comes immediately. A sharp snap that travels through my foot and into my chest. The ice dissolves into the body of water beneath, and I step back, heart suddenly loud in the stillness.

Not yet. Not thick enough. Not safe.

And here is the thing I’ve been avoiding saying, even to myself: I know this feeling. I know the temptation to test surfaces that look solid but aren’t quite ready. I know the crack, the sudden give, the cold shock of realizing I’ve misread the moment. These three years since the accident have been years of careful testing – toe first, weight distributed, ready to pull back. And I have been doing better. This year has been good, genuinely good. I can catalog its goodnesses if I need to. I know the healing that has taken root, the writing that has sustained me, the return of something I might call joy. Most days feel normal now. Most days I can walk where I need to go, can trust that what looks solid beneath me actually is.

But not always. There are still times when the ice seems thin, when I can’t quite trust myself, or others. The darkness I’ve worn for these three years still shows me it lurks below the surface if I let it in. Some difficult thoughts have been playing in my mind these last days. Is it the approaching new year, the uncertainty of what it will bring? Or is it the end drawing near of this writing practice that has held me, day after day, week after week, for twelve months? What happens when the structure that has kept me going, kept me walking out to meet the world even on the hardest days, simply ends? Will I know how to stay awake without it?

And beneath all of this: will my faith ever fully return, or will I always carry this small hesitation, this muscle memory of breaking through?

Perhaps this is the wrong question. Perhaps faith is not something that returns intact, like a bone that heals perfectly back to what it was. Perhaps what I am learning is that faith reformed is not faith diminished. It is faith that knows the ice can crack, that surfaces can deceive, that solid ground is actually never guaranteed, and chooses to walk forward anyway. Not with the innocence of never having fallen, but with the hard-won knowledge of having stood back up.

I look down at the creek again, at the place where it widens and flattens, encased in ice, where the silence is most profound. Here, all the water moves underneath, hidden, doing its work in darkness. A few feet upstream, the stream babbles over rocks, audible and alive, but in this wide, quiet place there is only stillness. Water remembering how to wait, how to be patient with its own transformation. I can hear the blood pulsing in my ears.

Last week I had stood at Dodd Lake’s edge where the ice had just begun its quiet claim. A thin rim along the eastern side where the water meets the dried grass and the shadows linger longest. The kind of ice that looks temporary, negotiable, like it might retreat by noon if the sun decided to argue back. But the sun hung pale and indifferent, and the ice stayed.

I’ve been watching this lake fill with geese for weeks now. First a few dozen, then hundreds, and now thousands. They arrived gradually as fall deepened, dropping from the sky in ragged formations that dissolved into the water. The ice hadn’t won yet, but I could see what was coming. Each morning the open water shrinking, the geese pressed gradually closer together.

That day they were everywhere, their constant honking and muttering filling the air. Thousands of voices negotiating proximity. They paddled in tight formations, shoulder to shoulder, crowded into the dark channels between the frozen margins. Some had already given up the water entirely and stood on the ice itself, unbothered by the cold beneath their feet.

But today there are no geese, only an eagle soaring high, and I wonder if he’s hungry, if all the mice are huddled warm underground. It’s a day for being inside, and yet. The desire to walk, to listen, has called me out into sub-zero temperatures. I am the only one here. The conditions are such that I could be the only one on earth, standing in this moment, witnessing this particular convergence of ice and light and frozen time. The isolation is both gift and warning. I have learned to be alone with myself this year, learned to stay present even when presence is uncomfortable. But standing here alone, I wonder what I am practicing for.

Is it for the next hard thing, the next fall, the next moment when the ice gives way beneath me? Or is the practice itself the point. This daily choosing to notice, to feel, to stay alert to what is here? Perhaps I am not practicing for anything. Perhaps I am simply practicing being alive, being present to whatever comes, whether it is beauty or breaking or the long stretch of ordinary days between.

The ice is not a metaphor I have chosen. It is simply what this day has given me, what the creek has offered up. But I receive it anyway, this lesson in surfaces and depths, in the temporary nature of every solid thing, in how transformation happens slowly and then all at once.

I turn back toward home, the eagle still circling overhead, the creek still frozen and flowing at once. Behind me, that dancing leaf continues its solitary performance on the ice, spinning and gliding, held aloft by what holds it captive, finding freedom in the very thing that keeps it from moving on.

Not yet, I think. Not ready to cross. But I am here. I showed up. I paid attention once again. Tomorrow I will come back and test the ice again.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane