River Touchstones – A story from the San Juan River
Heraclitus said, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Today’s story takes this very literally.
One thing I do not realize the first time I head for the river is that the person who steps onto the raft will not be the same person who steps off. The water washes not only grains of sand from the belly of the rock; it washes from me my routine, takes me to a momentary place, a liminal space, where so many things cease to matter. The consequences of the step onto the river are as opaque as the red silt water. It is a time and space where, like the rock, I am carved… we are carved, yet added upon one grain at a time.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it.
Last week we shared stories of serendipity and miracles. This week I’ll share an award-winning story about how we collect the touchstones of meaning in our life travels, and why those lovely, meaningful stones matter.
A warm breeze hums through the screens along the top of the palapa-style hut. Grass walls swing like skirts as I stroll in, unintentionally late, my Chacos picking their way across the dirt floor scattered with peanut shells. My navy sarong wisps around my tan legs, natural air conditioning in the hot, dry desert air, and the pre-trip dinner fills with the chatter of strangers. “Where are you from?” “What do you do?” “What brings you to the San Juan?” “Have you been here before?” I see him then. But at the time it means nothing. He means nothing. Instead, I glance at the lady wearing the red and blue Hawaiian shirt with naked surfers on it, and the two older gals with funny sun hats and drooping skin at the first table. A pudgy rocket scientist from Colorado and a newspaper owner and his wife chatter as their verbal exchange disappears on the San Juan breeze. I am the journalist-on-the-job and I plop down by an artist from New York and him, the writer for the New York Times at the corner table. We introduce ourselves and make pointless chatter about the wonderful week ahead. We have no idea the difference seven days will make. In our mid-thirties, we claim the title of “youngest in the group”. It’s the night before we launch. The energies and gestures, some indifferent, some intense, have started to intermingle between everyone; the beginning of our metamorphosis from single to collective.
Tonight we will sleep in our B&B’s, our motels and lodges; tomorrow we will pile, one on top of another, into cargo vans, our torpedo-like gray dry-bags filled with too few clothes and a shortage of sunscreen. Tomorrow we will begin to share more than we ever intended–the river requires intimacy. You cannot live for seven days in the wild without in some part, meshing with those you bathe, barf, sweat and eat with. There are not many circumstances in which you find yourself peeing in public with recently acquired acquaintances, but river running is one of them.
It’s only been a few months since I took my children, divided nine years of belongings and left my husband to try and find the happiness I was certain I deserved. Loneliness is a multi-sided space. There is the loneliness when one simply wants companionship; there is the terrible loneliness one can have despite being with another person; and then there is the compound loneliness of being untouched, unappreciated, unconnected. This is the loneliness I carry on my back as I step onto the river.
At 6:00 a.m. we struggle to push the rafts from the shore, the sun filling the desert...
