year of the body
a river appears
I am sitting inside of an air conditioned stadium in the middle of August, surrounded by thousands of people, all with their eyes closed. A lone speaker is on stage, guiding us through a meditation. He instructs us to go somewhere beautiful, where we can totally relax, be free.
I am transported onto a raft floating down a river that lives deep inside a lush forest. Bird song fills damp air. Thick moss coats trees, shimmering green on steroids. The raft is no larger than the length of my body in any direction. It’s primitive in construction, logs tied together with string. I’m lying naked on wood, one calf draped lazily over an edge, toes cruising cool water. Sun bakes down on my bare skin through cracks in the crown shyness. As I coast down the river, creatures emerge from the forest periphery to greet me.
Back in the stadium, I have dissolved into the hard plastic chair, my edges have left the building. I am a puddle of clothes. My spine a ghost.
It will be years before I feel this level of relaxation again.
daylighting
This is my fifth attempt to read Is a River Alive? and I’m committed this time. It’s been months of false starts. I think perfectionism is partially to blame, but possibly more so, this book is just too potent. I’m afraid what is required of me is devastation.
The first time I cry is sixteen pages in. This is where Macfarlane introduces his co-authors by name. They are all rivers. This is not metaphor. His sincerity presses against an ache I didn’t know I had. I am yearning for a knowing beyond logic.
It’s in this book that I learn the term daylighting - the practice of un-burying a river or stream that’s been hidden under concrete in dark drains or tunnels.
“Daylighting lets water meet the sun again.”
quit therapy | March
I promised myself that 2025 would be the ‘year of the body’ - a personal call to action to get the fuck out of my head. I did not know what all of those embodied people were up to, but I could tell that they had something I lacked.
My first task - quit therapy.
My therapist had helped me tremendously, but I sensed she could not carry me through this next threshold. The final nail came during a session when she asked
“but what does it feel like in here?” pointing to her head.
I swear she meant to point to her heart.
a dam is built
I entered my body at the pace of a crawl.
Work was killing me, each month’s stress somehow building on the last. Rumination accosted me at all hours.
In desperation, I found myself back at the river of my dreams. I had been there many times since the stadium encounter, but this time something had shifted. When I arrived at the edge of the river, there was no raft. Instead, a haphazard pile of sticks laid in its absence, obstructing the water’s flow.
It didn’t take long for me to register the scene. This barricade was made of my own thoughts.
I had built a dam of self loathing.
algae infested
Macfarlane says that we are rivers when running, pools when stagnant. I think about the form my body took for years at the job. Algae infested, choked of oxygen, natural rhythms ceased to keep pace with the artificial.
My body of water harnessedfor private equity.
Some of my coworkers owned walking desks. I’d watch their heads bob along in the Zoom window. A slow death march.
Upper Peninsula | May
I awake to the sound of a river. Escanaba. She has kept her Ojibwe name. Her steady growl pierces the walls of our rented cabin. When I open the sliding back door, she rushes in, drenching every crevice in rhythm.
We can’t keep our eyes off of her all weekend. Her gait is just as intoxicating - coursing, jiving, flying.
I wonder if she is recalibrating my insides; my cells have been conditioned to the hum of appliances. Now they are practicing muscle memory. this is how we flow.
We do nothing but make fire, sit and watch her for hours.
in her glory
The river of consciousness can upend, dislodge, and unmask anything.
Everything is possible in its wake.
Nothing can stay for too long.
Nothing can go missing forever.
river dreams
I watch as a younger version of me enters the river and wades towards the pile of sticks. She grabs one from the jangled jenga tower and climbs back onto the river bank, depositing the wet stick onto warm, sun soaked grass. She turns back towards the river and repeats this same movement.
I study her until I embody her. I pull sticks one at a time, naming them as I go - each an insult I have wielded against myself.
We are drying them out.
body cavity | July
I sit with my eyes closed and focus my awareness inside. I am seeking stuck energy. I don’t have to look far. Anything with a charge is fair game - a mistake at work, an unanswered text. Once located, I breathe into the space and wait.
How big is it? What is its shape? What is the feeling inside the shape?
Over months, I find orange parking barriers, tea cups, doilies and ants in my body cavity. In order to release the energy trapped inside of them, I often have to physically move. It’s not a polite practice. I shake, snarl like a caged animal, kick and punch the air in a tantrum.
I am daylighting these feelings, exposing them to light.
the trees | August
I leave my phone in the car. I’ve started running without inputs. There are too many voices in my head that aren’t mine.
I’m on a trail that bobs and weaves with the Chicago river. At two miles in, I consider turning back, but I keep getting beckoned further into the forest. Here the trail is still hugged by a road to the south, yet I am deaf to the sound of cars. The trees have taken all five senses.
They ask me to slow down. My mind is reluctant, determined to keep pace, grasping for any sticks to measure myself against. Finally, I surrender and slow to a walk.
Their message is urgent. Leave the job. It is now dire. An intelligence below my neck understands the risk.
Alone on the trail, I ask them for a sign - was I really just talking to trees?
A bike bell rings behind me.
Red Hook, Brooklyn | September
I’m in the middle of a group of strangers next to a shoreline, hugged by a pier on one side. We are lying on sand and rock. My head is buttressed against someone’s back, hands resting on a foreign shoulder. Silently, we begin to rock while waves lap to shore. Over several minutes, our entangled bodies rise with the water, torsos scooping, hips leaning - each bearing the weight of another. Eventually, our octopus arms ascend skyward, floating just above an imagined sea level.
We are mimicking the movements of a particular kind of seaweed during high tide. It is an unintentional slow dance. A small crowd has gathered to watch us.
I am shocked by my own nonchalance and further yet, how much I’m actually enjoying it. My former self would have walked by in mild disgust, using her intellect to build walls against this charade, embarrassed for its participants.
Once disbanded, our somatic lead says that she likes the way I moved my body.
I can’t peel the smile off of me.
giving notice | December
It’s a normal Wednesday except today I am doing something I’ve fantasized about maybe thousands of times.
My final act in the year of the body - I am giving notice at work.
I wish I could say that I do it triumphantly, but truthfully, I stuff my resignation into the last five minutes of an hour long meeting with my boss. When I’m done, she looks like she’s seen a ghost, but keeps her composure until we click ‘end meeting’. We don’t talk for the next 24 hours. At first I’m afraid it was only a fever dream. Finally, a Slack message from HR settles my paranoia.
Meanwhile, my body registers the change immediately. Everyday after quitting I find my arms outstretched above me in that famous Rocky pose. I am a plant intuitively reaching for light. It’s the opposite of that TED talk where they you teach how to power pose before an interview. I am posing because I have finally chosen my life.
Over security. Over comfort. Over certainty.
My body rejoices.
freedom raft
We’re back at the river. Handfuls of sticks are now dried out on the bank’s edge. My younger self is sitting in the grass with some in her hands and this time - string. I watch as she wraps the string around each stick and then starts tying them together.
This is when it hits me.
She is building the raft that I saw all those years prior, the one that will eventually set us free.
It is buoyed by the same words that nearly drowned us.