Yet Another Baptism

A Shift

I feel the thirst of the ground beneath fallen leaves calling out for the beads of moisture beneath my collar, under my arms, in the hollow of my back as I trudge down the mile or so walk along the river. The wind is unseasonably warm and shockingly still, holding the spell of solitude that has descended on the river path. The water is low and slow moving, a trickle where once was a roar. No birdsong fills the valley.

I stumble along the path, tripod as walking stick, mind churning, a defensiveness drawing my shoulders up beneath the light pack I’ve brought with me. My footsteps startle an embracing couple under the mimosa tree I harvested this year’s tincture from- I feel my heart swell with something like hope. The light is a gossamer web that hangs suspended in the air, not quite touching that which it envelops.

There is a spot along the river where a flat rock creates an altar over a pool deep enough to swim in. It is where I bring myself when I need the river, when a cold plunge is the only salve to a migraine, when my grief becomes stones in my pockets that need underburdening, when I have so much rage that it roils beneath my skin like a fever. 

I strip my outer layers, tee-shirt sodden with sweat, flannel limp with exertion, jeans thick and heavy. My feet flinch against the river rocks; my body struggles to remember how to resist gravity without orthotic inserts. My belongings are arranged like an offering on the ancient boulder and I survey the best point of entry, avoiding the mass of drowned leaves in favor of a sandier patch of river bottom.

The river remembers that it is November, jolting me into reality from the realm of the mind as I submit to the cutting clarity of the mountain water, feeling it fill my sinuses, my ears, as the world narrows to that which I can feel pressing against the edges of my body. A liminal space where time shifts. I feel myself slip through something while the cold interrupts my system.

A gasp, a burst of light, a startled, stuttered breath, and I open my eyes to the thinnest of places, nervous system reactions sending vibrations along neural pathways. My diaphragm bucks against my attempts to control my breathing, a stammer on the exhale, fight or flight wrestling for control, my sight consumed by the sudden saturation of the world, the ecstasy of embodiment, feet against river rock, fingers splayed against invisible current, water pouring from my ears, my nose, utterly consumed by breath.

I have been coming to this river (which in my mind is mythologized as the River, as in, the place my mind goes to when I say “I’m going to the River” without specifying where) for several years. There is a relationship between us, one that I strive to honor when I come seeking solace.¹ After my plunge, wrapped in a flannel and seated on a rock far older than the human race, I open a beer and pour out the first sip into the river, holding space for gratitude. 

Unexpectedly, my voice cracks from my lips and a simple apology floats between us. “I’m sorry.” With this named claiming of responsibility, grief becomes a hollow in my chest that demands to be heard, to be held, to be felt. My perception of the world shifts again, tightening around the dark pit behind my breastbone. Something becomes undone.

It is easy to become overwhelmed in this world. We casually consume mass death and violence, are exposed endlessly to hate and greed. Our brains crave self-protection; we are living beyond our bodies and embodied responses. In some ways, it is easier to stop caring than it is to sit with the inequities of our world, with the weight of the grief in our world, even as that apathy is its own type of privilege, and a participation in the delusion that the state of the world does not affect all of us who live within it.

The immensity of it all can be crushing. Although I often talk to friends as if I am a pragmatic realist, at my core I am a delusional optimist prone to bouts of nihilism. Some days, the culture of care in my communities dreams up a difficult, but joyful future. Some days, I struggle to see ways forward, my relationship to the future strained. I question my place in the world, in the work that I do.

Octavia Butler once said in an interview when asked about if humanity was doomed, "There's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There's no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be." 

As I sit by the river, something unravels, something is woven. The fear and shame that I’ve carried for so long around rejection, around being seen as I truly am, around getting it wrong, around not being enough, suddenly feels insignificant in comparison to the work I am doing to build towards the future, the work we need to do, the work I have yet to do. Butler’s quote reveals us a path to agency in a world that feels, and largely is, outside of our control. We can choose to participate as an answer.

I think often about how many times in my life I’ve been told I care “too much.” I feel too many emotions, too deeply, too often, which must be corrected. Though I am often wary of conflating physical and emotional pain, my own experience with chronic pain is often intertwined with my emotional pain. I have often sat in the dark hours of an insomnia fueled night wishing I didn’t feel so much. 

Yet, as I look up from my huddled seat on the edge of a rock placed by the river by forces much larger than I, I find that gratitude for that same deep well of care that is the undercurrent of my life. That care inspires me to feel joy watching the catfish nuzzling rocks in the brilliance of the afternoon sun because I recognize that we are in each other’s company, that we are connected through water, through the mysterious web that is life on this complicated planet.

These connections call me to renew my commitment to this beautiful, painful, awesome world, to the communities of human and more-than-human creatures I live alongside and within, to care deeply even when it hurts, to acting on my values even when fear or shame arises, to action even when it’s not perfect, to learning more, always.

A bird sings out in the thick of slumbering trees on the mountainside. I rise from the rock, pack up my things, and return down the path.

1. A practice informed by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings in Braiding Sweetgrass, as well as Slavic folklore traditions of bringing offerings to honor river spirits and creatures.