How the Iceliner Was Born
The Iceliner Express began as a way for me to organize my inner world long before it became a model railroad, a modality, or a story universe. It started with something simple: a small wooden card catalog cabinet - the kind libraries used before computers. Each drawer held a different "catagory" of my life: memories, emotions, identities, challenges, and the pieces of myself I needed to keep track of. I had been saying I used an apothecary cabinet.
When someone asked me what an apothecary cabinet was, I realized I had been using something akin to the card catalog from libraries. A cabinet with small drawers where pharmacists used to keep ingredients to mix prescriptions. I was using it to sort, store, and safely access the things that mattered.
Over time, that quiet personal system evolved.
the drawers became stations.
The categories became passengers.
The movement between drawers became tracks.
And the entire thing shifted from a static cabinet into a living, moving world.
That transformation - from stillness to motion - is what created the Iceliner Express.
It's a kinetic version of the system I created for myself. A way to organize thoughts, challenges, identities, depression, anxiety, emotions, crisis, and stories. Through movement, placement, ritual, mindfulness, and imagination. It's the same architecture as the card catalog...it's just alive now.
The Iceliner Express vs ACT
Many of you might identify some of the concepts I’ve developed for the Iceliner Express parallel ACT (Acceptance and Commitment “Therapy”). I didn’t even know what ACT was when I first developed the apothecary cabinet for me to try and make sense of my own experiences.I used to work on problems/issues/subscriptions by imagination. I got an apothecary cabinet and wrote the problems down and stuck them in the drawers. I had Silly Putty and a stack of comics. When I wanted to work on something I’d pull it from its drawer, pull up an image off a comic with the putty and imagine it as the issue. I’d stretch it, poke the people’s eye out, smash it on the table. When I felt better I’d put it all away until the next time. It was static but I’ve always wanted to share it.
I evolved it to be trains. You imagine yourself on one of the trains, put the issue in whatever car it fits in and take a ride in your mind on the Iceliner Express (all the cars have functions).
Here, from “Acceptance vs. Avoidance, for instance:
Acceptance means opening up to our inner experiences and allowing them to be as they are, regardless of whether they are pleasant or painful. Thoughts, images, memories, feelings, emotions, urges, impulses, sensations…
ACT would have you try to drop the struggle with them. The Iceliner Express gives you a route to imagination. Imagine dropping those inner experiences onto a train and sending them away. Or putting them on a rocket and blasting them into space. Sometimes just saying “be mindful” of them just doesn’t work.
I’ve lived through my share of tragedy (and enough to spread around the world). Which is how I know it isn’t always possible to just “drop the struggle”.
To:
• Allow it to be there
• Open up and make room for it
• Expand your mind around it
• Sit with it
• Stop fighting it
• Make peace with it
• Give it some space
• Let it be
• Breathe into it (What?)
• Hold it gently
• Hold it softly
• Hold it lightly
• Lean into it (Yeah right!)