I am the love child of Frosty the Snowman and Queen Elsa from the movie “Frozen.” At least that’s what my friends think. But I do not have antifreeze for blood, and there are no super genes in my skinny carcass. Dogs regularly try to bury me. The truth of my awakening to winter is totally un-mythical if somewhat magical.

The physical stuff goes back half a lifetime to swimming in very cold water, which I don’t think inoculated me against Jack Frost’s nippiness. The magic, though, that’s another thing; and I challenge you to experience what I have and not be enchanted right out of your three layers of long johns.

Because it’s hard to notice tingling fingers when your soul is on fire. And can you tell where a shiver is coming from when your senses are dazzled by a blind rush of excitement over phantom blue snow at midnight? Air floods into your lungs, your heart surges, your mind leaps. Galaxies of stars cascade between snowflakes as you soar through long arcs on skinny skis. Civilization shrinks back, blocked by the silhouettes of a primal forest, and phosphorescent dunes throb and beckon you to reach escape velocity…

So the source of my dalliance with the winter world is poetic. However, there is a man – Ice Man, they call him – Wim Hof of the Netherlands (nether lands, indeed), whose legendary approach to body control in frigid climes arose, he says, out of grief over his wife’s suicide. That almost makes sense, given the man’s passion. To be sure, he describes reveries seemingly induced by hyperventilating, and his exploits such as stomping barefoot up ice-locked mountains in only shorts and immersing himself in tanks of ice for a couple of hours have withstood scientific scrutiny and spawned medical inquiry (https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/superhuman-iceman/ ). More than that, he trains other people to do the same using basically breathing techniques and thought control. I ain’t throwin’ my $500 Salomon boots away, but that’s pretty incredible, and not easily dismissed. Miracles hover on the research horizon.

The first time I read about him it triggered eerie connections with what I’ll call “inner gen.” Now, I’m not a mumbo-jumbo mystic by any stretch, but there are halfway things that seem to fall between biology and energy, and I’ve long been fascinated by what I can only assume is a metaphysical bridge between them in the human mind/soul that has yet to be identified. I seem to stumble a few steps onto that bridge whenever my spiritual reflexes suppress my physical reflexes.

Has to be done naturally, however – drugs and alcohol suppress indiscriminately, whereas you must remain keenly tuned to the natural world if you want to discover – and summon back – what’s behind the mists of human evolution. It’s the natural world that you have to unveil, the one that is dumbed, dinned and dimmed out by the stultifying norms of everyday modern living. I say natural world, but of course there’s nothing unnatural about people. Thing is, when you strip away the façades and veneers that we create around ourselves, you discover a less hypocritical morality as well. The true and lasting standards that come from within contrast sharply with the self-serving, manipulative shifts that drive us like sheep through the media.

There are tantalizing bits of super reality that come to you then, hints of ultimate truth unchanging and foundational. Wim Hof clearly describes such moments, and I relate to some of them. I have, for instance, held my breath for just over five minutes, hyperventilating into a serene, almost hallucinatory state exactly as he describes. Other examples are more complex and not easily explained, though they come with a rush at the border of extreme activity that changes one’s physiology. Doesn’t sound scientific. Sounds magical. But what is science if it’s not explaining magic by cause and effect within the rules of the universe? In fact, isn’t what science explains almost always first seen as magic?

Much of my daily adventuring seeks out what I still call magic or romantic idealism. Call it what you will, it is simplified and clarified by winter, perhaps because dormancy stops the action, literally freezes it like a lab slide under a microscope in bright light. Winter seems to offer an x-ray, a blueprint or schematic of Nature’s secrets.

Let the trees go naked, paralyze all water, release the high-resolution light of an all-seeing sun against a backdrop of snow, and you will parse reality into more rainbows than you knew existed. (Always befuddles me that people hibernate indoors from this and then experience things like SAD!) Outside it’s like a time-out to examine, restore and heal in order to bring forth the miraculous realities of the rest of the year. And if you add extreme activity, your own genetic memory may take a few more strides across that metaphysical bridge between body and spirit. Wim Hof found it in grief filtered through his extraordinary physiology. I get there most easily through mystic rites in the White Cathedral of Winter. Cathedral. Because it’s spiritual. And if you venture down the nave of that vaulted Eden during the season’s silent sermon, you just may catch the phantom flash of a Wizard behind the curtain.

A few photos to wander through below: #1 look close, there’s a windmill tangled up in that tree; #2 my grandlad Seamus summiting Everest; #3 could be that Wizard behind the curtain mentioned in the previous paragraph; #4-5 a couple other photos I took at Elm Creek and turned into canvasses in my home; #6-9 more photos of Elm Creek early and late; #10-11 my lad Sean, the boy child, in whom I am well pleased on Christmas morn; #12 a shot from lifelong friend Bruce Norvell’s ranch outside Sun Valley, Idaho, where I’ve often chased winter in the past decade. Bruce says it reminds him of when I told him that the night sky should be white, given the density of stars in a vacuum (it’s called Olber’s paradox).

Breathe deep and savor the ether of the universe, my friends. I’ll catch you again around Valentine’s Day…