Mineral Beings
10 thousand years of melting
Switzerland left a deep grove in my memory, eroding and expanding further each time I climb back into the reflection of this journey.
We are walking through the valley where once was a glacier. Naked rocks, exposed after hundreds of years of invisibility become fragrant and porous: they sing a song of a new warmth.
I plunge my palms into a glacial stream. Cold, green-milky water runs over my skin, cooling down my body.
An ominous feeling hangs over: this is another planet, where life has only just begun, and at the same time life has been here for so long, that it found the most beautiful expressions to morph into. Minerals and elements surround us in their purest form, in their essence.
Not far from our hike rests an abandoned copper mine. You can see how oxidized copper has found its way into the landscape, in glistening sand deposits, in water, in boulders scattered by ice stealth across the basin.
Rock after rock, stone after stone, my feet get used to the constant instability of the ground. My legs are tense and wobbly at the same time. Stepping and jumping before thinking triggers intuition and the hike becomes a hypnotic, repetitive meditation. All I see is rock and the slowly approaching mouth of the Zinal Glacier.
Minerals keep coming back to me in different ways in life. Having dealt with copper toxicity I find myself in a place where locals worked with copper for centuries. The copper mine of Zinal, tucked away in the foot of the mountain, served as a source of sustenance for local inhabitants. Shepherds would use massive copper cauldrons for alpine cheese making. As I learned later, this is the only copper mine open to the public in Switzerland (with a guide).
It took us several hours of climbing and tumbling to come very close to the glacier. There were moments when I thought I wouldn’t be able to cross another stream or get over another hump of sharp rocks. I was afraid to even think how we would get back home. Incoming dark clouds changed the mood of the afternoon: from the lightness of the Sun bouncing off of snowy caps to a continuous trail of suspense.
As we approached the ice, another danger revealed itself: the mountain peak cavity full of snow just in front of our valley. Mid-May temperatures seemed to make an avalanche probable. (Learning just now that a month prior to our trip, an avalanche in a neighbouring valley took the life of a young person and heavily injured another three.) The thick layer of snow kept watching us through the whole trek. We kept staring back at it. The closer we got the the glacier, the closer was the snowy peak behind it.
I felt a kind of fear in my body that was hard to explain. But the fear was constantly interrupted by the prodigious. Or, perhaps, caused by it.
I heard that we feel awe when we are mesmerised, but in fear. Struck by the beauty and frightened by it at the same time. As if this beauty could capture your life.
I want to move forward to touch the ice, I want to move forward to step into the glacial mouth, hear the dripping and feel my skin attach to ice as I touch it.
But I am stuck. Fear takes over my whole body. My eyes track the lines of the horizon and movement below my feet. I shape-shift into a lurker for danger. Looming snow above us, larger streams in front of us, melting crackling glacier, and a thought of several hours of climb back through the rock-ridden valley.
And so we sit frozen for 15 minutes. Going back and forth in our minds. “In this time waiting around we could have gone to the glacier.”
But something in me won’t let me move further. Any minute something could trigger this avalanche, or this glacial ice to collapse. We’re in a climate chaos and nothing is predictable anymore. Animate forces speak in small wind gusts that push snow off a ridge, only for us to notice. A small boulder rolls and catches speed down into the valley. Hitting other rocks on its way.
I feel something crystallize in me. A kind of reverent respect for this place replaces thrill-seeking. I am scared. I am in awe. And perhaps, I know my boundary.
Here is enough, I tell myself. Here I have reached enough. Here I let go of the desire to demystify the ice cave I sought the whole day to enter.
This moment was one of those decision points in my life where I chose mystery over desire to know and experience. Letting the glacier be and stopping the dance with desire. Laying the desire down in a melting snow, in a stream.
I was speaking with the glacier. I was speaking with the rocks and the snow around. They spoke back to me. They communicated energetically, and I wanted to listen.
Who am I to talk about animacy, if I don’t listen? Who am I to take pride in my pagan ancestry, if I don’t speak with minerals that made me? Who am I to ignore the danger, to ignore a mythical moment and forgo the locked door, the only chamber I am not allowed to enter?
We sat with the glacier in front of us and turned around.
A strange feeling to turn away from something so magnetic. Fear of missing an experience of a lifetime was carving larger and larger passages within me. Regret. A thin line between cowardice and pride, between ignorance and reverence.
This glacier will never be at this melting point, ever again in our lifetime. It will continue receding until it becomes a mythical serpent that once carved the valleys.
2022 and 2023 have been the years that Swiss glaciers have melted 10% of their total volume. In comparison, the same amount of glacier mass was lost between 1960 and 1990. As snow melts, it exposes the dark rock formation beneath that becomes a magnet for solar heat. This pattern speeds up the ice melt in mountainous alpine regions such as the one we were visiting.
Just three weeks after our visit to Zinal, massive flooding happened in the southernmost region of Switzerland. The path where we started our hike was completely closed, as the glacial river expanded and chewed up parts of the road, running parallel to it. River Navisence that I sat by (and in) back then, turned into a force devouring everything on its path, sparing no man-made constructions.
River Navisence knows its path—streaming here for over ten thousand years, the onset of the last ice age.
We’ve been in this Glacial Spring since then, through thousands of winters, summers, and autumns, the larger season of spring has had its dominion. But in the past 80 years, it’s sped up increasingly.
Being by this river I felt the essence of myself. I felt “this is me”. Its colour, its flow, its stones. I didn’t want to leave. I just wanted to sit there for a very, very long time. Only a prayer for this place is worthy of an offering.
I can’t help but think about the flow of an inner river of life force energy. What happens when it floods? Capturing all destabilized patterns, pathways of thoughts, and even creative blocks. When this river floods what superficial patterns does it disrupt in our lives? What everyday importance is lost when flood water is the main character of the myth?
If you trace this river, it will lead you to the ever-melting glacier.
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