While the Ice Was Falling

This blog is usually a place where I linger with art, beauty, and the small, human moments that soften the edges of daily life. It is where I look closely, slowly, at color, texture, process, and becoming. What follows feels slightly outside that frame. And yet, it feels necessary.

I am not a big sharer or talker.

I’m an introvert, an empath, and a serious overthinker. The only people I regularly burden with those qualities are my immediate family and occasionally my closest work people, simply because a good portion of my life happens at work. Thankfully, these people love me enough to hold space for all that comes with me.

I usually keep my heavier thoughts close. Especially the political ones. I’m not someone who widely discusses what’s happening in our country outside of a small, trusted circle. But right now, I can’t seem to keep this one contained.

I have friends who show up loudly and bravely for those suffering the unfairness of what is happening in our country right now. They march. They organize. They put their bodies and voices out there. I am not a crowds, noise, yell-with-a-sign kind of person. I root them on, all the while feeling a quiet guilt, like I’m taking the easier way out.

But then came the ice storm, forcing me to reflect on my own silence.

You know the kind.

The kind they warn you about a week in advance.

The kind that sends people scrambling, clearing grocery store shelves, wishing they’d bought a generator, checking batteries, filling bathtubs, or fleeing to warmer places if they’re able.

That kind of storm.

This morning, waking to branches coated in ice, my thoughts slowly began to wander. I had gone to bed reading about another innocent person killed, and I woke to the quiet of ice‑covered branches and a stillness that felt heavy with all the unrest in the world.

We are, as a country, in an ICE storm.

Not the kind you can prepare for.

Not the kind you can fully predict.

The kind you hope doesn’t reach your street.

Your city.

Your family.

The kind that arrives with force and leaves with devastation.

The kind that feels ruleless.

Careless.

Intrusive.

The kind that rushes in and disappears just as quickly, leaving people injured, displaced, terrified, or fighting for their lives.

Ice.

ICE.

Both bring danger.

Uncertainty.

Fear.

Both are invasive.

Both can be deadly.

And I keep coming back to this question:

If you looked outside during an ice storm and saw your neighbor in trouble, cold, stranded, hurt, would you not help them?

Would you say it wasn’t your responsibility?

Would you look away because it felt uncomfortable?

Because stepping outside felt risky?

Or would you do what you could, however quietly, however imperfectly, simply because they are human and in need?

I don’t have answers wrapped in certainty. What I have is an unsettling awareness that something dangerous is happening. I notice. I care. And I am left sitting in the uneasy space between witnessing and action, knowing that quiet awareness carries weight and that care, on its own, is not enough.

Ice storms eventually pass.

What they leave behind can take much longer to thaw.

And perhaps the question worth sitting with is not what others should do, but simply this:

When the ice is falling, what does it look like, for each of us, to remain human?