The first line always feels the hardest. The first step. The first time uttering something aloud that was once confined (ahem, excavation journals)—held within whatever makes us feel temporarily separate and contained. Call it body, call it mind, call it ego, call it what you will. The first time making-contact with articulation (often of a feeling) with a force of expression can be clumsy and overwhelming. Exhumation, enquiry, and living entanglements don't necessarily make for an easy existence, but they make for a meaningful one.

Something was always calling me—and it has taken the form of the ongoing phenomena of ecological psychology—what Bayo Akomolafe describes as “a will stronger than our own, sending us away from home for reasons beyond our understanding”. Home was not a nest or a foxhole but had become a sharp black metal box, a confined space I unconsciously identified with, with equally constrictive ideologies as introjects.

I could have spent a lifetime thinking about doing more—staying small enough to slip under the radar, avoiding conflict, confrontation. Obedience standing quietly by the lock, holding the key that kept me enclosed, separate, individual. But a will stronger than my own arrived. It came as kin, as biogeochemical cycles, and it blew my box into the river Kairos when I decided to attend graduate school.

The current smashed it against ancient rocks, forcing the lid open. My body was released—flooded, washed and occasionally pummeled in rushing waters. I floundered, teeth chattering from the cold, watching landscapes blur past: memories, ideas, stories. The river carried me swiftly, my head dipping under between gasps of air.

I tried swimming toward the bank, grasping at slime-covered rocks, meeting the riparian world; its inhabitants busy with their work—filtering water, scraping algae, each playing their part: chironomids (their name coming from the Ancient Greek cheironomos, meaning one who gestures with his hands—something we have in common), mayflies, stoneflies, crane flies, beetles. Living their purpose; then the current took me again.

When caught in a fast flow, it's hard to know if you're in a river or a flood. Hard to imagine a beginning or an end—precisely because they don’t exist as fixed distinctions. They are relationships, iterations, intra-actions with landscapes and change. At a certain point, my mammal body went belly-up to the sun, surrendering to the current. To resist became futile. I was being forced to change; involving myself in changing, involving myself in being changed. 

Narratives of exceptionalism and individualism weighed me down. I still feel them tied to my toe—when they catch an obstruction, I am abruptly stopped. The waters again crash against me, my head plunging under as I struggle. But remaining in place allows me to check my surroundings— to see what caught me. I study the landscape, ask eagle to unhook me overhead, and rejoin the current. This will be a lifelong practice and reminds me how being on Earth was never meant to be easy or seamless. To be an ecological organism is to risk and to move, like so many of my kin, even when it's terrifying to peer out from the burrow. Life demands participation. Psychic life demands risk and engagement.

Dams give us the illusion of control. Of containing energy and extracting it while ignoring and denying the vast ecologies they disrupt. My own ecology had constructed such a damn and when it inevitably broke has taught me the necessity of exchange, not as theory but as embodied practice. I am learning the need to move my body daily, to spend less time inside manufactured spaces. To feel the transience of clouds, the constant transformation of sky. To press my body against trees and their deep, ancient rootedness. There is no bypassing when you are rooted.

Diversity has shown me all the life swimming in the river beside me, inside me (hello microbiome) and the diverse life drinking from the riverbanks; the dangerous journeys many take to get those sips of life giving water. How the banks of a river are shared, not hoarded. Diversity has taught me how creativity emerges from thinking with others, learning from them not about them. Developing reverence for all the different bodies, doing things differently. 

The mountain of unfelt grief I began with is just another part of a flourishing ecosystem and that same mountain stream joins the rapids of the river Kairos, I know I will continue encountering contrasts; different ecologies as a differentiated naturehuman belonging to these cycles. You cannot question belonging something you have literally emerged from.

I respect we have agency, that we all have agency. We can effort to participate but we cannot predict what will happen, who we will meet or where we will be taken. Decaying and psychological die off’s are not comfortable, predictable or controllable. But when you find calm after the storm, smelling the renewed air and petrichor, a subtle sense of trust emerges.

Life feels finite to a contained organism, yet it is anything but. On days I feel defeated, I close my eyes and remember that my body has taken incomprehensible forms before finding this one. That even in contrast and pain, I know on a deeper level how grateful I am to be seeing through these eyes at all, for however long I have in this form and getting to love the imperfect messy world I see. And that this form, too, will continually change and metamorphose.

The river does not stop for me. We move together—sometimes I flounder, sometimes I float, forever a part of it as an each. The current carries me toward landscapes unknown. I do not know where I will land, only that I am participating in a way I could not have imaged before. Imagining a skill itself that had frozen in the permafrost but is thawing. As my time at viridis closes, I remember porousness ensures there are no closing doors—that life is a drifting, a struggling, an unhooking, a rejoining. A body in motion. A body at rest. A body belonging. Naturehuman, nurturing natureculture.