Whole Being: Life Alchemy
Being, Belonging, Becoming
The New ICE AGE
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. ~ George Orwell, 1984
When ice came to my neighborhood, I was not the one they were looking for.
My papers were in order. My body was not marked for removal. I could, in theory, stay inside, lower my voice, wait it out.
So why was I in anguish.
Because I do not live as a sealed unit. I live as a node in a web. Because my safety does not end at my skin. Because a neighborhood is not a collection of private fortresses but a shared ecology of lives brushing up against one another every day.
Fear travels through relationships.
When ice arrives, it does not just take people. It alters the air. It teaches the nervous system to listen for engines, for footsteps, for the wrong knock at the wrong hour. It teaches children that the world can turn hostile without warning. It teaches neighbors to wonder who might disappear next.
I am in anguish because this is my neighborhood. I share it with others. Their terror enters my body because I am not built to survive alone.
Ice behaves like an invasive species.
It does not belong to the ecosystem it enters. It crushes what evolved to live there. It kills through disruption rather than coexistence. It insists that domination is the same as order.
They say immigrants do not belong here.
But belonging is not decided by uniforms or vehicles or the loud repetition of authority. Belonging is revealed by relationship. By care. By mutual reliance. By the willingness to uphold the laws that protect the fragile from the powerful.
Those who trample rights are the ones out of place.
There is nothing lawful about violating due process. Nothing legitimate about seizing people without warrants. Nothing orderly about terrorizing neighborhoods into silence. When rights are ignored, legality becomes costume, not substance. Power dressed up as law is still power.
Ice claims to be enforcing the rules, but it breaks the most foundational ones. The right to be presumed innocent. The right to be heard. The right to exist without being hunted. In this way, ice exposes itself. It is not legal. It is coercive. It is foreign to the principles it pretends to defend.
I am in anguish because I recognize an alien presence.
Not foreign because it crossed a border, but foreign because it violates the moral grammar of a shared society. Foreign because it does not know how to live alongside difference. Foreign because it mistakes fear for strength and cruelty for control.
An ice age does not just threaten those it targets. It threatens the entire ecosystem. Once the ground freezes, nothing grows. Once neighbors are taught to look away, the social fabric thins. Once rights are conditional, no one truly has them.
I am in anguish because I know how this story unfolds.
But I am also attentive.
Because ecosystems remember warmth. Because communities remember how to shelter one another. Because even invasive species can be resisted when life organizes itself around care rather than fear.
I am not afraid for myself.
I am afraid for what we are becoming.
And that fear is not weakness. It is fidelity.
The day after I wrote this, a tragic incident happened.
Renee Nichol Good is dead. Killed in the wake of an ICE operation. In Portland, gunfire. Conflicting accounts. Official statements that ask us to doubt what people on the ground saw, heard, and lived. Once again, we are told to stand down from our own perception.
This is the moment George Orwell warned about. Not merely repression, but the command to abandon reality itself. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
That command is being issued now.
People are tired. Not confused. Not ignorant. Tired. The exhaustion comes from being asked to metabolize fear while being told it is order. To watch bodies fall while being told nothing is wrong. To feel anger rise in the nervous system and be instructed to call it exaggeration.
This is not hysteria. It is recognition.
When a regime lies, it must also exhaust. When it exhausts, it hopes people will stop noticing patterns. Stop connecting deaths. Stop trusting one another. Stop believing what they know in their bones.
But ecosystems do not forget violence done to them. Bodies remember. Communities remember. Anger, when it rises from grief and love rather than domination, is a form of clarity.
I am still not afraid for myself.
I am afraid for what happens when we are told that reality is negotiable, that due process is optional, that death can be explained away if the uniform is correct.
That is how an ice age spreads. Not only through force, but through enforced disbelief.
And yet, people are paying attention. They are naming what they see. They are refusing the lie that cruelty is law and fear is safety.
That refusal is not rebellion for its own sake. It is fidelity to a shared world.
Renee Nicole Good
Murder victim, shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on behalf of the Trump regime, January 7, 2025
Let me tell you how she died
she died without a weapon
while trying to drive away
with her child’s stuffed toys
in the glove compartment
She did not die by accident
she was killed by a system that fears witnesses
by those trained to obey without listening
by a country that calls cruelty enforcement
she was a poet,
who saw what others
tried not to see
she was a neighbor
who did not look away
she was a mother
who understood
the cost of silence
say her name
say it slowly
say it like a spell
against forgetting
Renee Nicole Good
A poet died today
A neighbor died today
A mother died today
And we will not forget
