Daring, Nicely.

I recently saw a post on writer Elizabeth Gilbert’s instagram feed which made me jealous. In it, she and a handful of gal friends are naked, shoulder deep in cold east coast river water. She explained that going to the water everyday had become their collective coping mechanism, a way to shed the armor and remember their own vitality (my words, not hers).

As some of you know, when I first arrived in Maine, my brother had recently died, my mother was battling cancer, and I’d just left my support system of 20 years in Seattle to move across country without a clear idea of where I would ultimately land. Walking across the street and going swimming in Penobscot Bay became my saving grace…a way to shock my system into staying at least a little bit present and accounted for in the middle of so much grief. At some point I realized I’d been making the pilgrimage daily for a few months and I dared myself to keep going as long as I could into the descending autumn days. I made it to November 17th.

But since I moved into my own house a bit farther away from the beach, swimming has become a sometimes thing and not one that lures me, generally, once the weather turns. For instance, I haven’t been in since the beginning of October and that solitary swim was the first in a few weeks.

Lately I’ve been descending more and more into a state of numb dullness. I doubt I’m unique in this. Going on 8 months of pandemic life and the election looming are, for many of us, reasons to armor up in whatever protective shells we turn to in times of trauma. For a while, I was conscious of trying to choose healthy coping mechanisms: yoga, writing letters to voters in swing states, saying magic incantations when I pass a Trump sign instead of swearing angrily….. But the last week, I’ve just gone gradually deeper and deeper into the safety of house, mindless television, and chocolate dipped in peanut butter.

The truth is, I have begun to worry that at the end of this pandemic time I will have become so dull and uninteresting that I won’t even know how to converse when we get the chance to go out and converse freely. Who is going to want to hear about my binge watching of NCIS New Orleans. No one. Yet, when I’m in this state of numb non-awareness, that’s about all I can absorb at any given time and, therefore, it’s about all I feel qualified to report on.

Then, today, AJ and I went for a walk down to the water and then up by the local waterfall. Halfway up was a deep pool being fed from above and slowly draining out to the sea. I thought of Liz Gilbert and my own wisest calls toward the water in times of distress and, despite the 43 degree air temperatures, I stripped down to my birthday suit and went for a dip in the cold crisp pool.

If you have never stripped bare in the middle of the forest and walked into freezing water you might not know that while a shock to the system it also releases amazing endorphins and the body gets almost hot with the rush. Still, it was so cold, I didn’t think I was going to be able to submerge fully….maybe only up to my thighs was enough. But it’s always been important to me to feel the water on the crown of my head in order to get the entire nervous system in on the experience, so I dipped my head in. Once there, it just seemed silly to be dry from my eyebrows to my thighs, so I took the plunge.

Rarely in my life have I experienced such visceral joy. And, yes, even having experienced some fantastic sex….this was right up there, if not better. While sex can merge your consciousness with the heavens, this naked plunge into the waterfall was like merging with the earth and sky all at once. It was a jolt of electricity into the soul and body simultaneously….it was like the first kiss and the orgasm wrapped into one.

Of course, part of the euphoria was the sudden remembering of my own vitality and connection to the life force that is all around us. We are always surrounded by it humming and blowing and warming and cooling and rushing and beaming and shaking the ground and melting and hardening while we sit in our lives trying hard to imagine everything will be ok, safe, still, and normal soon.

I don’t think it will be. Normal. Soon. Or ever again. I suppose there will be a new normal, someday. I suppose that’s why I’ve been shutting down, going numb: fear that life as I’ve known it will never return and a willful frozen state of pretending that it will.

I think, though, it’s time to accept, even before the outcome of the election or the supreme court nomination, that life is going to be pretty crazy for a while and maybe there is a way to keep awake by connecting to what makes me feel alive and whole and accepting that this planet is and always has been a live wire and we, as symbiotic creatures who live upon it, are similarly capable of change and charge at any given moment.. And we should swim in the cold water, or dance, or kiss, or….whatever it is that connects us to our very visceral awareness of being alive.

So, do it. Whatever it is….strip down in the forest, naked, and swim or dance or make love or just hold hands….I dare you….in the nicest possible way, I dare you.