12.30.24 - listening with the river
Content Warning: there is mention of fear of assault from gender-based violence. It is in the third paragraph. I noted what I did to support myself: orienting to place, deep breathing, turning the head slowly side-side. You’re welcome to do those, or other supportive practices, if you feel charged.
When the body is related to and met in a way that honors its sacredness, wisdom, and choice, the body may reveal and express its freedom. Maybe the body hasn’t been able to be seen and tended to in this way much before. Our world is not separate, our bodies reflect other bodies, human and more-than-human alike. The ways that rivers are dammed, contained by cement, forced into narrowness in urban development, drained and dumped into - this isn’t something of the river’s own choosing. River chooses to move in undulating rhythms, that arc and weave across floodplains and valleys. Spreading and shrinking as cycles of water change. When a river chooses how it moves, it can caress each stone, fish can flow through them, toads spawn in them, the shade of old hemlocks overhead cool their waters. When we see the river as a being who can choose, we see them as someone, not something. We meet them in their sacredness. When a river is seen in eyes imbued with this honest relationship, the rivers may choose to sing and speak back too.
We’ve had snow present here for most of December, it’s been glorious. Thick sheets of ice have been layered on top of the river water, nestling around the stones and blanketing the river in quiet solitude. With the erratic weather patterns of climate change, over the past couple days we’ve been having rain and heat quickly melting the snow and bringing it all down to be carried by the river. The river is now so loud I can hear their bellows from my bed. Up close, I see the river is rounding up on its banks, thick white caps swiftly churning as the water rushes past. Deep plunging. I realize that the places where each rock rested this summer are going to be changed when I see them next. The depths of change are in these waters.
Today, while walking the road along the river to a place on the riverbank where I like to visit, my mind and body became heavy and frantic with fears of assault. Coming up with all these scenarios of someone, a stranger, coming up and assaulting me as I walked the road or finding me once I sat. These thoughts can be common for me as a trans person, as an AFAB person, as a person living in this world where there is immense cruelty. I found a secluded spot to sit tucked behind the moss-covered upturned root system of a fallen tree and breathed deeply as I turned my head side to side and oriented to where I was. I wondered why I was having these thoughts today, unspurred. Around me, the waters were heavy and rushing, cacophonous, no longer covered by their thick coats of ice. I thought about how maybe the river isn’t choosing this gushing, swelling loud overwhelm right now. And the way that if I was assaulted, I would not be choosing the way that that person was relating to me. Me and the river, this imagined assaulter, the surge of heat, the rocks moved underwater, we’re all connected, reflecting.
Some of the healing work needed right now is about supporting people in learning their boundaries and filling themself with themself, welcoming and expressing their full selves, and having freedom and choice. In a world where capitalism, racism, transphobia, and environmental desecration are so prominent, violent and confining, it can often be and feel like we don’t have a choice in what we do and the ways we relate. This healing work is supporting people in building pathways of connection with their bodies, with their homes that are made of water, made of mineral, made of breath, all of which is borrowed and returned, held and shared, received and given. There is this longing for this reclamation and connection. There is this longing for freedom, for choice, for personhood, for belonging. And it may feel like a small thing to come to the river and meet them as their whole wise self, who I have so much to learn from. And I see that when I meet somebody, when I come to them and hold space that witnesses them in their whole wise self, there is a softness that breathes in us. Sometimes guards are let down and dams are broken when the body senses this witnessing, safety, and support. “Oh, you see me as I am, you see me in my wholeness,” the body sighs. It is a subtle thing. It is a massive thing.
I come to the river and to clients with humbleness, curiosity, reverence, and possibility of change. Maybe it is enough to offer a deep listening and holding. People’s journeys, the river’s journeys, teach me that this listening is where the healing, the reclamation, the truth telling, the whole-hearted whole-bodied full-presenced living can thrive, through meeting each other as sacred.
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Now, as I’m walking home along the river, I listen more and wonder if maybe the rivers are asking us to witness them, to see their wisdom as they express this rushing and gushing. To be with them as they swell over their sides until they burst into us, into our bodies, into ways that change us. Humans have always been drawn to rivers, making our trade routes, roads, and rituals along their banks. We can see rivers. We see them when we come for washing, for fishing, for traveling. When we come to bathe, for reprieve on a hot day, we see them. We see them. Maybe the rivers of blood and lymph moving through our bodies recognize their kinship with the rivers flowing around us. Maybe the rivers are revealing themselves so big, so that not only do we see them, but so that we may grieve and weep with them, we may change with them, we may grow ourselves with them. We may learn to carry them as they carry us. Our floodplains and veins, our rivers of change.
moss holding water on the root system of a tree on the riverbank
