I am learning how to be more like a river.
I’ve long had this experience of my body being a channel, a vessel for waters (emotions, sadness, joy, music, poetry, dance) to flow. It’s a somatic thing. I have learned how to feel my body this way through movement and embodiment.
I had to spend a lot of time clearing out the dams of my traumas. There was not flow for a long time. There was backup, blockage, unexpressed emotions - mainly rage and grief - from my lifetime and lifetimes before. I had to get it out.
This often just looked like me, alone, raging out on my pillows or writhing on the floor in my bedroom.
But after a huge heartbreak, I found myself on my hands and knees in a dry riverbed in the forests of Portugal, where I screamed and cried harder than I ever had. I felt like I was dying.
And in the moment that I saw a tear fall from my eyelashes and land in the caked dirt between my hands, my wailing became laughter.
The riverbed wasn’t dry.
I was the river.
And I laughed. And laughed. And sang. And cried. And laughed some more.
A few days later, at the beach in Portugal, I was met by the surprise of a river that opened its mouth into the ocean. Here, I floated back and forth for hours, as the current of the river carried me towards the ocean, and the current of the ocean carried me towards the river, neither one releasing me fully to the other.
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Saturn energy is like a birth contraction. A scarf tied tightly around the neck. A new Daddy. The pressure that makes a diamond. The teacher who models discipline, structure and form, and kicks our ass a little bit, for our own good. The tension between the current of the river and the ocean.
When Saturn is in Pisces, we are learning about Piscean things, which are quite different than Saturnian things. Pisces is the mystic. The unseen. The felt.
Think of those two little fish swimming in a yin meets yang formation, for all of eternity. We are the dark in the light, we are the light in the dark. We are the cycle, the spiral.
Saturn entered Pisces in March of 2023. We could say that during this time we might learning hard lessons about flowing with the currents of life, oneness, enmeshment, the collective unconscious, isolation, codependency, emotions, trauma, what is in the shadows, madness, dreams, fantasy, poetry, art, music…
Pisces represents the invisible cosmic soup we are all swimming in - the field that unites us on a spiritual level.
Pisces also rules the feet. There’s something about walking in each other’s shoes. Empathy. Like it’s a rainy day, and all of our socks are soaking wet, and we smile at each other when we hear our shoes squeak. Again, oneness.
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When I returned home to Oakland after my time in Portugal, my ex had moved out from our house, and I moved my musical instruments into the bedroom where his things used to be. I began writing music every day.
A couple of months later, I found myself floating downstream at Barton Springs in Austin, Texas with my best friend. In backstroke, I stared up into the blue sky and heavy white clouds above, and sobbed.
The movement of my arms opened the grief in my chest in a way that felt like flying.
I felt my heart burst with the realization that all the love I felt for my ex was still inside me. That that love didn’t belong to him.
I even thanked him, the one who broke me, as I looked towards heaven, for being the mirror I needed to shatter any illusion of separateness from God. For being a part of the divine orchestration of the play that was my life.
My belly quaked with aliveness, my legs kicked like a frog, and I was one with the waters of the world.
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In March, right around when Saturn officially entered Pisces, I spent two weeks on the southernmost point of Mexico, on Playa Zipolite. I helped my best friend facilitate a women’s initiation into their primal animal body. We moved and danced and sang and cried and drummed and built fires and howled. We swam in the waters of what is known as Death Beach, where the mouth of the ocean opened to us and offered us a long sweet sleep, if we wanted it.
I knelt on the sand, naked, under a full moon, and unintentionally drew the figure of a lover beneath me in the sand. His head, his shoulders, his arms and chest. My heart and belly bloomed with a longing for Him.
And in the same moment, a wave of the ocean came and washed him away, the fantasy of my Eternal Beloved. My soulmate that I’ve been searching for, forever.
I screamed, and cried, and howled.
After the initiation was over, and after a solo nap in a hotel room, I woke up to the sensation of my heart cracking open. Again. It has gotten really good at doing that.
It took my breath away. Just as soon as I opened my eyes they started crying. It felt like something was being ripped out of me. My body contracted, and released with each wave of grief.
Contracted, and released. Contracted, and released.
In that moment I knew it was time to travel. To detach from the home I built with my ex in Oakland. To detach, let go, release, surrender, to be swept up by the dream of life.
I found out a while later that the day I had this opening, was within a day or two of my ex also leaving Oakland, to live with his former life coach, now girlfriend.
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Before I left Oakland, I was saving money for my travels and working at a restaurant, and I kind of overworked myself. Because I was wearing the same shoes every day, I started to feel warm sensations and tingling on the sides of my feet. Signs of nerve damage.
The overworking was a form of distraction, disembodiment, disconnection, disassociation. There were a lot of feelings surfacing around leaving my home of almost 6 years. Where I had built a life with another.
I couldn’t feel my feet on the ground anymore. My footing.
Oakland was no longer the river I needed to be swimming in.
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When I visited home for a month, between leaving Oakland and arriving in New York, I found a river in the foothills of the mountain near where I grew up.
It had always been a desert in this part of Southern California. There was never water here.
After wandering amongst the dry brush, rocks, and wildflowers, I heard the rush of the current, and ran towards the sound, giddy, excited, childlike.
When I first saw the clear stream, the sun sparkling on the surface through the dancing shadows of the sycamore trees, it felt like the face of God staring back at me. Source, resource, life force, ready to hold me. I burst into tears.
I baptized myself in the icy waters, and was reborn with the knowing, deep in my bones - all the way down to where the chill reached - that the river of life is always there, waiting for me.
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When I am one with the current of life, I am weightless.
As I float in the Atlantic, near the surreal landscape of Coney Island rollercoasters and advertisements for freak shows, I feel my body relax into the ride of the ocean’s waves. I bob and float next to strangers like a bunch of babies in the bath. Happy, jovial, kinda stupid and silly, in the best kind of way.
Life is a dream.
When I walk the streets of Brooklyn in my new neighborhood, I wear my sunglasses because then I feel like I have a layer of protection between me and someone else. I can measure them up. Assess who would win in a fight. I can look them up and down, connect with them, fall in love with them, in private.
In New York, without a car, I walk everywhere. I got myself some ugly but so comfortable shoes - crocs AND clogs - and I feel my feet opening where they used to be numb. I feel the flow, the life force, restoring through my tendons and joints.
Sometimes walking here is overwhelming. You are expected to walk into oncoming traffic or against the directions of the signals. Okay, I guess it’s not expected, but encouraged. Suggested.
I get lost and turned around easily. When I’m not sure if it’s safe to walk across the street, because the signs don’t matter and no one is following any rules, I just look to see if someone else is crossing the street in the same direction as me, and if they seem aware, I hop into their current.
I feel like a little fish. Navigating flow. Practicing oneness. Trust in the field.