The Prismatic Null

What comes with the Ice from the East

I’ve been meaning to start a substack for almost a year now. I did not plan on disaster blogging, but now feels like as good of a time as any to begin pumping out some writing and sending it into the noosphere. I intend to write much more, and improve the quality of my writing greatly over time, so bear with me. My interests range the gamut, but will always touch on themes of beauty, intelligence, and the living future. I am grateful to exist in this mysterious world, and intend to glorify and vivify it with my thoughts. Thank you for reading this; it gives these words a purpose!

We’re 9 days into what many are calling the Icepocalypse, a massive grid outage covering most of Northern Michigan caused by a 3-day ice storm that destroyed thousands of power poles, miles of lines, and untold quantities of trees. As I write this, we are still without power at our home in Cross Village. We are warm, the fire is roaring, we have plenty of food and water, and yet the fact that this is an unprecedented natural disaster is exceedingly evident. I’m writing this because I know this because I know this event is important. It’s important to me, and I know it will live in our community’s collective memory for a long long time. If we move with our eyes open, it has the opportunity to be a pivot point in our local history. This is a special time out of time, as late winter always is…but this time it’s extra special.

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We shouldn’t forget that the ice storm began on the day of a solar eclipse, deliverer of fate, or that it came from the East. It came in gently, as a drizzle. I have to imagine this is one of the slowest, gentlest, and quietest natural disasters ever. The perfect one for a little civilization built on sugar sand hills in the center of one of the stablest and plainest tectonic regions on the earth. Nothing too crazy ever happens here, so even if we are getting hit with a grid outage on par with Cat 5 hurricanes, it’s going to be glittering, and twinkling, and chill. We had our warnings: expected grid outages, ice accumulation of up to .5” (we’ve never had to understand what that looks and feels like before). We did our basic prep: 5 gallons of drinking water, emergency dry foods stocked, etc. and waited as the drizzle began to accumulate.

The first night wasn’t bad for us. The wind was soft, and power stayed on. It wasn’t until the second evening that we realized this was something a little more powerful. Snow and thunder at the same time…for the third time this year, and yet I’ve only ever witnessed it one or two other times in my life (notably on the winter solstice of 2012). By now the forest was absolutely glazed. The birch trees had surrendered and were bowing to the ground, a graceful groveling that you don’t see very often these days. They must remember a time when they were neophytes in the first earth cult. Having a deep appreciation and deference for these obviously angelic beings, I was quite moved to see them bow down in such respect for the ice elementals coming to do their work. I’ll have to remember this bow in case I ever meet some dignitary truly worthy of my abject and utter surrender.

The quiet gave way to popping and cracking at this point, as trees began to meet their capacity, and limbs began to snap and drop. The Eastern guard got hit the hardest, for once, and made the greatest sacrifice to protect the inner regions of the forest. The power lines (we live next to a big one, no mere distribution line) got lower, and lower, and lower. I began to wonder if the 50’ easement is wide enough. We rushed to brush our teeth and enjoy the ease of running water one last time as the lights began to flicker. I watched the outage ticker on our power company’s website go up and up, and then we transitioned from watching The Event, to being inside it.

The next morning, the sky was low. The dual power of Ice and Electric charged the environment and clung to everything. The earth stood still, and though there was a gentle breeze, each and every blade of glass(grass) stood glitteringly, glaringly still. Trees hung heavy and the lines were so low across the roads that I felt I had to duck inside my truck as we inched by, delivering water and 2-cycle engine oil on our first mission. Roads I’ve driven thousands of times, and places I’ve seen my entire life were completely unfamiliar. Everything looked…rendered. It was stiff and laden and ominous. Obstacles were around every corner, and hazards were coming from above, in front, and from both sides. It’s a novel and exhausting experience to simply drive a vehicle when you have to look in every direction for incoming projectiles. My first mission to my grandma’s house was aborted due to the continuing hazard of danger from above. She’d have to hole up for at least another day until we could cut her out of her driveway.

The scale of the devastation was just starting to sink in for me, and for all of us. We started to hear things like “the worst ice storm in 100 years” and “the grid doesn’t need to be repaired, it needs to be replaced”. We still didn’t know what that meant. Seemingly credible sources were reporting estimates of power returning in as little as 2 days and as long as a month. We’ve never heard “weeks” in this context before; and “weeks” had never been this long of a measurement either. Photos started showing up on the local Facebook groups, and calls and offers for help. Because obviously, in our own mini-apocalypse, we’d still have social media.

I’m proud of our communities, and how quickly the channels of mutual aid came online. The warming shelters, the information sharing…it has all been quite good. I personally don’t think I’m in the position to, or even in need of elaborate extensively on this, as many others are doing a much better job of it. It’s probably the big news story, and what people will remember the most: The time our community banded together to render aid to one another…the heroism of the linemen who gave up the comfort of their families to work tireless hours to get us back online. We’ll most likely hold a parade for them, or at least a spaghetti dinner.

On Tuesday, day 3 or 4 depending on how you measure it, the ice was still thick on everything. The major roads had all been cleared to at least passable, and the sun came out. It was still, warm, and prismatic. Beautiful devastation was everywhere, and everyone felt it. I think it was this day that the religious awe was at its peak. Gratitude was high, help was on the way, we still had no clue how long this would last, and the sun was blessedly out! The eerie and unfamiliar transformed miraculously into novel, glittering and infinitesimally articulated light. Things already barely felt real by day 3 or 4, but when the sun came out and transformed a billion new crystals into seven billion new colors, it was rapture. Mary and I climbed the highest hill in the land to gain a vista we had never experienced before (and if we’re lucky, will never again). Eagle swooped low a few times to tell us they were working on a great purification and that their work was completed.

I’ll spare the reader a week of similar days of supply runs, minor missions, and plenty of buckets of water so that I can focus on the emerging import of this event.

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For me, this is where the meaning lies: A billion prismatic magnifying glasses flew in from the East to take over our entire region and bring us deep into a null point to shed brand new light on everything they touched. A new light, amplified and dispensed across our quiet little community. This, of course, paired with a heavy and ugly pruning and all of the suffering it entails.

One of the remarkable effects of this event has been how little things have changed in my daily life. I live remotely and work remotely from the home I built in Cross Village with my beloved Mary. My first takeaway was that our house rocks. It stays warm for days with the heat turned off thanks to our heavy slab floor, thick pillowy walls and windows that prioritize capturing every blessed modicum of sunlight we can get in the winter. With a little supplemental heat from our Woodstove, we’ve been rocking our living room in the 80s, with the far corner rarely dropping into the 60s for over a week. I am both grateful and prideful for this blessing, as this was all according to my design and put together by our own hands. We worked hard for a house this warm.

Once we got our flushing water harvest going, our home was returned to a state resembling normal. Better even, in many ways. The hum of the fridge and wifi was replaced by the soft crackle of fire in the wood stove and gentle red glow of candlelight. Heat has color, even in the infrared where we cannot see it. But all it takes is a few evenings of candlelight to understand deeply that real fire contains orders of magnitude more information than electric light.

In this induced null space, I have been able to relax more fully into my awareness of my own life and tap into levels of appreciation and levels of divine discontent. I was already at my wits’ end with boredom and loneliness at the tail end of the realest winter many of us have seen for a long time. This ice storm only opened up a deeper and more complete isolation and silence. Throughout the quiet week I have often thought about how my life will be no different when this passes. There’s nothing, really, to “go back to”. I wonder how many of us will have this awareness. We live in this miraculous, mysterious world, and yet most of our time is spent on rote survival tasks. Switching from working on a computer to chopping wood and carrying water doesn’t really change that on a foundational level. And as much as I adore my local communities and the people who make them up, I can’t help but notice that there is a distinct lack of direction in our culture.

When we clean up the mess and get families their power back, what will we be going back to? What are our collective aspirations? I have a friend who works with high schoolers in a local town and their median aspiration is to “work at subway” when they graduate. Is this acceptable as a culture? We are beings blessed with both consciousness and agency…are we really content to just go back to our humdrum lives?

I want this disaster to mean something for us. I want us to emerge from this mess renewed, directed and replete with creative force. After ecological disturbance, comes a new explosion of life to fill in the new niches that open up. It’s a good year to be a saprophytic mushroom. Its a great year to be an invasive tree beetle. We’ll need to learn to become those ecological opportunists if we are going to evolve, and allow this event to actually transform us.

As we rebuild, we will be asking questions about resilience. The obvious answers will be along the lines of underground boring, tree trimming and generator purchases. These are good and necessary, but when I feel into what our region really needs to be resilient, I think its something much deeper. I think we need a reason to live. We need an upward spiral to rise with! We need a cultural and civilizational vision that is worth working for…something far more rewarding than a paycheck and a modest living in a beautiful place.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that disaster struck northern Michigan, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was so beautiful, slow, and relatively casualty-free. Or that it is prismatic, that it came from the East, or came now.

I think the signs are clear: One epoch is over, and it is time to truly begin.

So let’s dig deep into ourselves and pull out our profoundest desires. Let’s do this as individuals, as families, and as a region of connected communities.

I have my inklings of what I think is coming, and I will share more soon; but I’ll rest here for now. I leave you, with prismatic visions fresh in my memory and hopefully in yours.