Incantation on Cold

I come from a place of deep cold. Long sub zero winter cold. Snow two stop-signs high cold. Twenty degrees is nothing to complain about cold.
I was born in the dark of November on the eleventh day of that eleventh month, in the north country. Cold. Snow. Night fabric of light-less-ness.
When I imagine my entry into the world, I think about the cold. All those long, first months I spent wrapped against it. I think of the cold of a car seat. January in northern Minnesota. When my mother or father took me to town or to the doctor or visiting.
The cold of the seat bites you; your hands, even in wool mittens, hurt to hold the steering wheel. How long it took a car to warm– cold tip of the nose; the windows never fully defrosted. Later, my child size hand scratching the frost that stuck and melted in my fingernails.
We skated on frozen lakes. In my memory, I could always skate. My five siblings all learned to skate. Rite of passage in these frozen lands where kids played ice hockey and men put their ice shanties out on the lake for fishing.
All summer we swam in those same lakes, weedy and shallow. Sandy. We swam around the fishing boats. We swam across the lake. We swam to the island and climbed out.
I have always lived in cold places. Places with dramatic seasons; everything explodes when a season changes. But I have been slow to embrace the cold.
Lately, I have been sitting in cold lakes.
Suffering long depressions during the winter, my body felt detached, muffled. Someone said the cold water might change me. How? I can’t say but I am willing.
There is something about the cold that scares us. The way it can kill. But that is also why we love it.
Stories like Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” in which a man freezes to death, unable to light a match. Stories we were told, growing up –if we fell through the ice into those forbidding waters, we’d die in a matter of minutes–hypothermia.
It is not true that you die in cold water. Eventually, it will kill you. But not at first.
All Winter Break, I went into the cold of the lake outside my parents’ home in northern Minnesota. Every day, my sisters and I, some of our children, ran with sock covered feet to the hole after sweating in the 180 degree sauna we’d stoked all morning. We plunged into the icy water. Glassy green sea of winter fish. Some of us stood still for long minutes as the body’s blood rushed to its organs. Before leaping. Before rushing back.
Every morning I thought, perhaps I won’t go today. Still–I did.
The cold gives sanctuary. Stillness. Something stops.
Be careful, my friend tells me. Ice is like glass along the edges. Re-open the hole each time following the original seam. Pluck all the ice chunks from the water before you enter.
The cold offers release. What the body holds. Stores. Keeps. Clings to. The cold offers.
Back in Vermont, we swim in ice holes cut for plunging. Water frozen four inches deep.
We take the wood splitting axe and break the ice. We follow the path, the map of its boundary. An original cut. Breaking it apart. Pulling free the long thin strips of ice, clear as glass. Ancient yet familiar.
It’s your feet and hands that can’t remain. The blood rushes to your organs, abandoning the extremities of the body. Your feet and hands hurt. Then your skin burns. Your feet and hands hurt the worst. Your skin burns. You can’t button things after you get out.
Leave something behind in the water, my friend tells me. Ritual. Leave behind. Water of transmutation. What cleaves.
I first went into the ice hole on a February morning. The air was nine degrees. My friend, guided me and a few other women. This midwife of cold water plunging, cheered us on as we dipped our bodies in, screamed, and jumped back out.
It took time to get used to the water. To trust I wasn’t dying when entering it.
The cold envelopes me. Mutes. Quiets. Silence. Another form. What is it like to be born? Can we find those places again. Return. Opening the void, memory of the beginning is also the end. Coded in the body. Coded. A pattern.
The cold offers surrender.
Early spring, last year, my friend and I dove into the cold, open water. How do you do that? I asked, as she paddled out, still swimming as I quickly exited.
If you stay long enough you get past the yuck feeling, she said. I learned to stay.
I learned to swim toward the dock and then the camp. Passed the stacked kayaks in primary colors. Passed the fallen tree that entered the water–spindle fingers beneath the surface, reaching up. Passed and into the stillness.
I stayed until I didn’t want to leave. And then I stayed longer. Still in the stillness.
I miss the open waters of spring. Every season laced with longing for another. Always this.
I can swim in any weather. Cold waters of winter lake. Ice temple, church of snow, ritual of body. The ice of winter lake. Walls going the wrong way. A darkness there, siren of the green sea beneath. Transmutation. Breaking. The offering.
I was born in the dark of November, six weeks before the longest night of the year. In the north country. Cold. My body. Born.