Fire and Ice: Antarctica to LA Fires

Finding hope under constant change

In the span of one month, my body traveled from Antarctica's ethereal realm of glaciers, where white land bleeds into white sky, to the apocalyptic fires of Los Angeles, before returning to my sheltered life in the mountains of Mexico. Fire and Ice. Creation and destruction. Paradise and inferno. My body is weathering the physical and emotional extremes, teaching me how much extremes have in common.

Fire and Ice—they both burn.

Watching massive ice walls crack and fall into the sea, then seeing LA’s landscape charred black, I realized how the extremes of human experience mirror each other. Privilege and devastation both fill me with gratitude and grief. Gratitude that I am okay and grief for those who are not.

But existing in the paradox of extremes is the definition of modernity according to Marshall Berman's 1982 book All That is Solid Melts Into Air. Berman uses Goethe's Faust as a metaphor for the modern condition - a man who makes a deal with the devil not for wealth or power, but for perpetual change and development, forever destroying the old to make way for the new.

We see this Faustian bargain playing out in real time: we trade our climate protections for job growth and free 2-day delivery, our face-to-face connections for the convenience of smartphones, our DoorDash delivery, so we can work more hours. We excitedly use AI to handle our grunt work, while worrying that we're training our own replacements.

Like Faust, we modern humans are caught between celebrating progress while mourning what it costs us. We are simultaneously the developers and the displaced, the changemakers and the changed, the ones melting what is solid and watching our own foundations burn into air.

Existing in this paradox is what it means to be a modern human.

Modern life is witnessing everything that feels solid melt before our eyes. From the literal ice caps melting in the Arctics to all our physical information disappearing to the digital cloud. Witnessing dozens of congressionally passed laws undone with a signature in one day. Shit, even the rings of Saturn are disappearing (in 100 million years, but still!).

Like Faust, we're all making bargains with the future - trading what we know for what might be. The question isn't how to stop the melting - it's how to live with it, how to find meaning and even hope in the constant dissolution and reformation of everything we thought was permanent.

As Sci-Fi writer Octavia Butler writes in her 1993 book Parable of the Sower, “The only lasting truth is change. God is Change.” Two decades before the election of Trump, Butler wrote about a presidential candidate with a zealot religious following who promises to, "make America great again." The book Parable of the Sower takes place in the 2020s, the decade referred to as "The Pox," short for the apocalypse. The book is a haunting depiction of a post-climate disaster society. Water is more expensive than gasoline. Public institutions shut down, most are illiterate, and humans don’t trust each other, as they fight to the death for survival. You can see why this book went on to be Butler’s first New York Times bestseller 28 years after its publication in 2020.

But what we can learn from Butler is that her characters never give up hope, even in the most dire circumstances. In an Essence magazine interview Butler said, "The one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up hope. In fact, the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope." The protagonist, Lauren, embraces change, allowing her to prepare and adapt to it. From the law of thermodynamics to Buddhism's tenet of impermanence, Lauren decides that the only universal truth is change and creates a religion around it. Her belief system recognizing that everything we touch changes us, and we in turn change everything we touch, embodies Berman's paradox of modernity — we are simultaneously the agent and object of transformation in an ever changing world. Lauren survives “the Pox” because she doesn’t resist change but adapts quickly to it.

Rather than anchor against the waves of change, I'm trying to be like Lauren - a buoy that after getting knocked down, pops back up and rides above the waves.

In riding the extremes of life, I find myself swaying between grief and hope - grieving the impermanence of everything from democracy to glaciers, while hoping that this impermanence means our darkest moments will also pass. When I look at my children, I feel the bittersweetness of time slipping through my fingers, but I also find hope that the traumas that shaped me will melt away like Antarctic ice, not freezing into their generation.

One night in Antarctica, over dinner with theoretical physicist Brian Greene, I shared about how the pain of what is happening politically, globally from genocides to climate disasters paralyzes me and asked him, “From your perspective of studying the universe, the time scale you are looking at, how does that shape how you see what is happening in the world?”

It turns out he wrote a whole book discussing questions like mine, Until The End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. The premise is about death: the death of the ourselves and the death of the universe as we know it. He went into Columbia professor mode and made an impromptu model of cosmic time on our dinner table. Setting a fork and butter knife a half centimeter apart, he gestured at the length of the table and said, “Imagine the length of this table represents the existence of the universe. The tiny gap between the knife and fork is this microscopic window where life is possible.”¹

His words hit me with the force of an ice shelf crashing into the sea. We are miraculously lucky to be here during this tiny window in which life can exist. Life is rare. Even the sun and the stars will go dark one day. The entire universe follows the same pattern as our brief lives: ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust.

I walked away from dinner telling Tiago, “I’m just a bunch of particles, governed by laws of physics, interacting, with other particles. What if instead of resisting change, I surrendered to the fundamental forces of nature?”

This is what draws me to studying space. Seeing myself as a micro-fraction of cosmic dust makes me and my problems feel small. With or without my involvement, the universe will continue to change.

Visiting Antarctica gave me this shift in perspective. It’s like the Overview Effect that astronauts describe seeing the earth from orbit how they are forever changed. Photos and documentary films cannot capture Antarctica. The expansiveness of it all can’t be described or captured, it can only be felt - and in feeling it, I understood both its ancient permanence and its constant state of transformation. The thundering of ice avalanches in the distance reminds me that even these massive glaciers are in perpetual change. The exhale of a humpback whale I could hear before I could spot with my eyes shows me how life adapts and thrives in the harshest conditions. The smell of a hundred thousand pairs of mating penguins taking turns incubating their eggs reveals nature’s capacity for constant rebirth.

I felt awe that I was in the presence of God and grief that I was witnessing Antarctica’s gradual dissolution.

It takes these shocks to the system to change our perspectives. In Antarctica often you can't tell where the glacier ended and where the sky started. The moment when boundaries dissolve, I forget I'm freezing, I forget who I am.

I was so present to how fleeting everything was. Every iceberg was so sculpturally beautiful and unique, and never to be seen by me again. Every wave fleeting into and out of existence. Every moment was one I could only witness and experience, never to be seen or shared with another human ever again.

On an inflatable Zodiac boat, we went into a cove of glaciers where this paradox was most visible. The line formations looked like waves crashing on the ocean frozen into an ice wall - movement captured in stillness (see photo above). The variety of colors of ice was so distinct, from the brightest white to grey white, to Tiffany's crystal blue. Each formation was like a massive ice sculpture perpetually remaking itself. In this landscape of constant change, I found a strange hope.

Nothing is permanent, not our stunning glaciers, not the homes of Los Angeles. Not this news cycle. Not our governmental leaders. Everything is fleeting.

Living in Mexico has given me my own version of the Overview Effect—seeing the US in its full complexity, holding its contradictions in clear view. I see the country that offered my family escape from poverty, where public education created a path for me to leap social classes. But I also see a nation where that middle-class dream is crumbling, regardless of which party is in power. Stable jobs have vanished overseas, everyone is united in hating our healthcare system, and young people are priced out of home ownership. People are angry and searching for someone to blame - immigrants, CEOs, the other political party - but the truth is both parties have failed the majority.

From here, I can understand why people are drawn to extremes - when the system isn't working for you, any change feels better than no change. Like an astronaut seeing both Earth's beauty and its vulnerability, this distance lets me see beyond American exceptionalism. Nations rise and fall throughout history; it’s impossible for the US to continue to be on top. What matters more to me is how we face our shared challenges as a species: climate change and not causing our own destruction. From this vantage point, I'm less concerned about American politics and more focused on human survival. After all, if we can't figure out how to continue existing on this planet together, it won't matter who is in power and what laws we pass.

This is what Antarctica taught me most deeply - that in accepting the impermanence of everything, from massive glaciers to political systems to our own brief lives, we can exist between grief and hope—and in that space find presence. Antarctica left me more present to what is real, right now: My precious babies growing too fast. My friendships IRL and local community. My aliveness.

I repeat my mantra, “All that is solid melts into air” and embrace change as the only constant. I find radical hope in the knowledge that nothing, not even our darkest moments, not even the energy of the sun will last forever.

1. I am paraphrasing from memory, but in his book Dr. Greene uses the same metaphor with utensils to describe universal time.