When water freezes, it has something to say. Sometimes it bends light. Sometimes it breaks it. Sometimes it sends it all back and remains hidden.

And all the time, it interacts with any other living form that breaks its surface. Ice is no more a dictator than water is.

It takes its form from its environment.

It’s fair to say that other elements that freeze at different temperatures have followed a similar process in expressing their environment.

The stories differ and yet are profoundly the same. What would benefit scientific approaches to these apparitions would be an appreciation of history. Organic time, and biological time on top of it, is not temporal time. The interactions are complex, but unbroken. Think of the journey this moon-faced stone has been on, from a gas to a solid, from eruption to erosion, from tumbling in a stream to weather in a grassland.

The journey is continuous, and it is not over. Taking an image of it right now is only an image of it right now, which gives a present-moment bias to science that the Earth does not accord with. The image below is billions of years old.

Which is to say that the beginning of the Earth is right now. Please take that as a message of hope, this solstice evening. The light is returning because it never went away.