Before last summer it never would have occurred to me to hike down a rocky gorge alone, slide my half-naked body into the racing current of a narrow river flume and lie on my back with my eyes open under the icy water to watch the sunlight flare through the trees above me. As a kid growing up in the suburbs, I understood that the act of putting yourself in water was supposed to be a domesticated experience, not a wild one. There should probably be beach tags involved, or a lifeguard, or at the very least a dock. I have no early memories of coming across a natural body of water in the forest and deciding to put my own body inside it. But last August, this was literally all I could think about doing.
I’d spent the end of July holed up with my family in the woods of Vermont. My routine was the same every day: once breakfast was made, dishes done, lunches packed, kids dropped off at camp and the previous day’s explosion of muddy laundry tackled, I’d wrestle with a draft of an essay that would turn into the first installment of Field Notes on Longing, then go for a run and paint for an hour or two before picking the kids up again in the afternoon. It was the first time in my adult life I’d been able to carve out long stretches of creative time over a series of consecutive days and I could feel a new electrical current in me. A gliding where before there was glitch and static. I didn’t have to coax myself over thresholds of resistance each time I got ready to write or paint or run. I just picked up where I’d left off the day before and kept going. The disruption of my regular cramped toggling between teaching and mothering and squeezing in art wherever it fit felt radical. My baseline during those weeks was low-grade euphoria.
But I could feel the window closing. We would head back to Brooklyn. The school year would start. My circle of care would swell from a few people to a few hundred people. I braced myself for the daily swarm of working parent micro decisions, feats of emotional alchemy, improbably MacGyver’ed solutions to an endless loop of problems ranging from logistically tricky to existentially dire in service of eking toward the basic daily goal of keeping the fucking wheels on for one more day so we could do it all over again. There would be stretches of delight for sure. Triumphant moments at school or in the studio. Little episodes of hilarity or care at our dinner table. But creatively I would be exhausted. Because each time I sat down to summon the muse I would be whiplashing back from whatever its opposite is.
One day toward the end of our time in Vermont as I was starting to pack, I fell into a spell of scrolling and came across a quote from Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami who said that when he’s writing a novel, he wakes up at four o'clock every morning and writes for six hours, goes for a run or a swim and then spends the afternoons reading or listening to music, and that for him this rhythm–repeated daily without exception for months at a time–is a form of mesmerism. A way to reach a deeper state of mind. I sat on the floor of the sweltering kitchen of our AirBnb, surrounded by half-full suitcases, art supplies, insulated coolers, hiking boots, damp towels and children’s swimsuits, staring at my phone with the word “mesmerism” vibrating through me like a gong. For a moment or two I felt my brain stretch into a crystalline expanse. I said “mesmerism” out loud to myself a few times like a mantra, passing it from lips to tongue to teeth and back again. Then I googled “Does Haruki Murakami have kids?” Spoiler alert: He does not.
And that’s when the idea of lying down in the bend of the river took hold. It may seem incongruous, but my thinking was this: I’d found a conduit to an otherworldly presence through a routine I knew I couldn’t maintain. But maybe there was a way to seal that channel into myself? Create a physiological blueprint that could encode it in my cells? Turn my whole body into a portal, so that even in the muck and weeds of picking up other people’s socks and grading capstone projects and frying eggs I could mesmerize myself, unhitch myself from the lurching mess and drop quietly into the pulse of what Mary Oliver calls “the summoning world”?
There’s a body-sized bend in the gorge cut by the Black River–a tributary of a lake the Abenaki people call Mamhlawbagok in what is now known as Plymouth, Vermont. The water in the bend gets deep and the current moves fast enough to wash the silt away so the sun can pierce straight down through the trees to the streaky schist of the riverbed and turn the water to a shimmering, almost phosphorescent blue. I’d been there a few times the week before with the kids. Watched them splash and talk to the river exactly the way I used to talk to the water in the little swimming hole in my hometown–water which, no matter how mucky or symmetrical its manmade banks were, knew that it belonged to something wild and sacred, and told me in the language kids can understand that it knew I knew it too. In the deepest threads of my unconscious mind, I’ve continued talking to water as an adult. But that morning in Vermont with the Murakami quote glimmering through my mind was the first time as a grown-up I’d ever heard the water talk back to me. By which I mean, in the most concrete, least metaphorical way possible: once the idea of lying down in the river bend took hold, I could hear the water calling me towards it.
The morning of the day before we left I laced up my sneakers and started running. I am not much of an athlete. The day was hot and the route was hilly and long. I had to walk a couple times.
As soon as I pulled off the paved road onto the trailhead the temperature dropped 15 degrees. I’d recently read a book called The Eyes of the Skin by Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa and had underlined a passage about how walking into a forest ignites all of your senses, including your peripheral vision. I pulled out my earbuds and walked for a half a mile or so in an oddly amplified miasma of sound–the buzz and scream of bugs, snaps of twigs under my feet, whirring leaves in the high treetops that might also have been my own blood rushing in my inner ears–all of which I vaguely registered as visual signals initiating from just beyond my field of sight. When I reached the place where the kids had led us down to the river the last time, I purposely let my vision blur, focusing only on what I could see out of the corners of my eyes as I sidestepped down the steep slope into the gorge, sliding on pine needles, holding onto thin tree trunks as I went.
I got to the edge of the river and greeted the water out loud, which I realize may sound woozy and twee, a grown person outside of any specific spiritual context talking directly to a river. But it felt important to ask permission before I stepped in. The same as pausing before you lean in to hug someone. Places are like people. If you listen, you can tell if they want your physical proximity or not. I try not to take it personally.
So I asked. And I waited. And when I was sure I could hear the river beckoning me in, I kicked off my shoes. Peeled off my socks. I was about to pull my sweaty tank top over my head, then hesitated.
The first ripple of fear: I’d forgotten to factor in the not-imaginary danger of being a woman minding her own business alone in the woods. In all our visits to this gorge we’d never come across another human, but still I felt a prickle of annoyance. I’m sure none of my male friends would have felt even a twinge of worry for their safety alone on the same riverbank.
I dipped my toes into the water. The cold shot up me like a shockwave.
The next wave of hesitation makes my inner feminist wince to type. It’s taken me the better part of four decades to mostly let go of body shame and learn to celebrate the raw, creaturely self-ness of my various parts. How I feel about the skin on my lower belly is the final threshold in this evolution. After three pregnancies, this skin is disorganized. Shambolic even. I don’t know who I thought would see it besides the river birches, whose bark, it made me half-smile to note, was exactly the same texture. In any case, the flare of shame I felt about stripping down to my sports bra and underwear put my nervous system on high alert.
Sunlight and breeze on bare skin soothed me instantly, but then the anxiety migrated to my feet. I should have brought flip flops, I thought. Or water socks. Even though I could see clear down to the river bed, I felt an involuntary recoil of horror thinking about what it would feel like to touch the bottom. Irrational to think there could be a river beast hiding in the shadowy places to yank me down, and yet… I scooted forward and let my feet sink a few inches at a time until my toes met rock. Fear spiraled up my legs. Then they went numb in the cold.
The last swell of resistance came as a chaotic tangle of questions. Who am I–someone who comes from a family of atheists and has never really learned how to pray–to come to this river for a make-believe baptism into an imaginary spiritual practice called mesmerism? Who am I–someone who weaves my life so intricately into the lives of my kids, my students, my community–to come to this river in search of a portal in the warp and weft of the everyday world? And even though I think I’ve gotten permission from the river itself, who am I really–someone who probably shares at least some cultural lineage with the settlers who displaced and killed its original stewards–to come to this river at all?
I sat still for a long time listening to the water and the woods. I remembered a friend who once told me that prayer is the desire to pray. I sank weight onto my feet and walked unsteadily into the river until the water was deep enough to sit down in. I sat.
The current came up to my chest. It was shockingly, breathtakingly cold. I’d seen a former student hyperventilate once but I’d never experienced it myself, the involuntary freight train of lungs spasming in-and-out-and-in-and-out without stopping. I knew it wasn’t just the cold. It was the fear. Of how glassy and ancient the water was. Of the gorge leaning in on me and the millenia it had taken the water to carve through the rock. Of the human violence absorbed by the land through the centuries. The everyday violence of the pandemic I’d been suppressing over the better part of two years, the wailing sirens, my kids and students grieving. My own complicity in violence. My small ways of perpetuating it towards others. Towards myself. All of these violences linked across the ages, following the same patterns, springing from the same wounds. The hyperventilating morphed clumsily into shivering, wracking sobs.
Then everything dilated to stillness. I noticed that even sitting up to my armpits in icy water, I could slow my breath if I wanted to. I trained every sensation on spooling air into my ribcage and out again. Then I leaned back until the water came up to my chin. Nose. Forehead. Each inch felt like I was knocking the wind out of myself on purpose, but then I’d recalibrate until I was lying flat, floating in the rushing water with one toe pressing against a rock so the current didn’t sweep me downstream.
A holographic peace settled. My muscles went soft. If I let all my air out I could sink down under the current until my back hit rock. I opened my eyes underwater and looked up at the light filtering through the canopy of trees. Gave myself over to color and movement and cold blurring past me. Body weightless, electric.
I want to tell you that once I got back to Brooklyn, I held fast to the euphoric, teeth-chattering version of me who floated through a timeless landscape dripping river water onto the pine needle carpet leading back to the road. I want to tell you that the sense memory of the river has stayed flush on the surface of my skin these last twelve months, ushering me easily through resistance into sacred expanses of mesmerism whenever I felt the urge. This would not be true. It has been a hard year.
But if the desire to pray is prayer, then maybe longing for the river is its own subtle form of mesmerism. Maybe thresholds get easier to cross the more you cross them. Maybe not every baptism is a one-time event.
What I can tell you for sure is that we went back to Vermont this summer. While the kids were at camp I went for runs and painted and wrestled with the essay that would turn into the second installment of Field Notes on Longing. And on the day before we left, I ran back to the river. Like a lot of rivers right now, its levels are low. Some of its channels were silty and dry. But the current in the body-sized bend at the bottom of the gorge was still running fast and deep. I asked permission. Peeled off my clothes. Stepped in and sank all the way down underwater, this time without hesitation.
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You can read the first two installments of Field Notes on Longing here and here.
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Currently reading…
every word Sophie Strand has ever written. (Or trying to, anyway… She’s written a lot of them.) Find her on IG at @cosmogony and prepare to get your mind blown to pieces then lovingly composted and re-sprouted.
Currently re-reading…
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses by Juhani Pallasmaa (thank you, Josef). As a non-architect I’m stunned by how much resonance I find every time I return to this slim volume.
Currently thinking about…
how the choice to put your body in a body of water is a birthright not a privilege, and that even balancing out concerns for safety, there’s no earthly justification, ever, for things like this.
Currently listening to…
songs about water and rivers, including:
Andromeda and the Milky Way by Meshell Ndegeocello. I’d be hard-pressed to pick my favorite Meshell album, but Comfort Woman is undeniably her most lush and the one I reach for without fail when mesmerism is in order. This track is my favorite one on the album and the opening lines, which repeat like a mantra throughout the song, “Take me down to your river/ I want to get free with you,” is one of my favorite love song lyrics of all time. Love not as a form of possession or control, but as a way to get free together. Site of love not bedroom or church, but river. And not just any river: your river, your own sacred source of fluidity and movement and change. What worlds could we create if we collectively reimagined love like that?
River by Ibeyi. Witnessing my friend and longtime creative collaborator Rebecca impart Orisha wisdom and teach original choreography to young dancers to this song several years ago was one of the most powerful artistic exchanges I’ve witnessed in many decades of doing creative work with young people. Years later this song flashes me back to that time and reminds me that river energy belongs in our classrooms, and that shared creativity and carefully tended space for young people’s inner lives can usher it in.
Transparent Water by Omar Sosa and Seckou Keita. This whole album is a prayer. It’s been on near-constant repeat this past year. When the river feels far away, these songs help me keep mesmerism close. Another bow to Rebecca for this one.
and speaking of bows…
Currently feeling grateful to…
folks who’ve been inspiring/ nudging me to share writing in a more intentional way lately, especially Alejandro Duran, Nasrin Jafari, Kamau Ware, Elana Bell, Rebecca Bliss, Geoffrey Kiorpes, Ife Babatunde, Josef Reyes, Mwenya Kabwe, Leonor Mamanna and Erik Quarfordt.
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