Hair Ice

There is a forest near my home where I regularly walk.

I have become familiar with it over time—the budding of leaves, the yearlings of deer and rabbits in the spring, the mushrooms that sprout with the winter rains.

This winter, I was unprepared to see strange and thin strands in beautiful forms, on and around random sticks on the ground. It was a cold, clear morning--something rare in the Pacific Northwest. Our winters are usually rainy with temperatures above freezing. As I looked more

closely at the strands, they seemed to be ice, but I could not imagine how they had formed! So unusual!

After returning home and doing a little research, I learned they are known as "hair ice." Hair ice forms when a specific fungus has colonized a piece of dead hardwood. Wood naturally retains internal moisture—which, in the Pacific Northwest, is rarely in short supply! —and when temperatures dip below freezing, the water in the wood begins to freeze. The fungus inside the wood inhibits recrystallization of ice and instead extrudes it out into fine, silky filaments that resemble white hairs--the filaments that I saw.

What was especially unusual about the hair ice was that I saw it. For hair ice to form in the PNW, there needs to be no rain, no wind, below freezing temperatures, fungus in the wood, and time for the ice to form and not be disturbed. This is quite the narrow window.

And somehow, I slipped into this narrow window. A narrow event that repeated itself a couple more times during our unusually dry winter. Yet every time I saw it, I felt awe. I felt like I had been let in on a secret. I felt like I was invited into a magical world. The circumstances of the event were so rare, yet common enough that anyone could see them. Not a supernatural event. These were not fairies or angels, but wood, organism and water.

We expect a great deal from life—and often even more from our spiritual lives. We expect dramatic experiences. Powerful insights. Sudden leaps of realization. Yet the ordinary is often what is presented to us. And within the ordinary—given certain conditions, and our awareness of them—something delicate, precise, and rare may appear. Not because it has been summoned. But because nothing has interfered. A baby’s breath while she sleeps. The aroma of cooked rice. A rainbow.

Hair ice is how frozen water moves into form when a fungus changes the process. What else might appear—quietly, briefly—when our usual structuring processes are allowed to soften? When our thoughts about the way reality is or needs to be are relaxed? Nothing is added. Nothing is forced. Nothing is expected. And life extrudes something marvelous into form.