Navigating the Cosmic River

Cosmic River Trip

Welcome everyone and especially the class of 2023. You all look wonderful in your aggressively red gowns. 

When I was first asked to give this address a few months ago, I was going through one of the hardest periods of my life. One crisis seemed to follow the next. I had no space to breathe or collect myself before another horrendous thing would happen. I won’t go into details but here are some keywords—cancer, miscarriage, abusive breakup, more cancer. You get the idea. Then, my car was sideswiped by a city sewer truck. That was it. A literal sign from God that my life had been hit by the shit truck. 

Meanwhile, books were being banned in schools around the country, trans youth were being attacked, there was yet another mass shooting, and the IPCC came out with a report that we have just ten years to get climate change under control, while at the same time Biden opened up the Willow oil fields to drilling. It all felt very hopeless. 

This is all too much, I’d tell my friends. I’m just going to become a woman of God. I don’t know what else to do but start praying. Now this is an odd thing for a person like me. I was raised by a Catholic turned Buddhist and a bohemian Jew, and together they created a sort of made up animist tradition. Was I really suddenly going to turn to Jesus?

I asked someone who knows your class what you are like. They said the words that come to mind are queer, nature, meditation, and anxiety. Oh boy do I get that. We live in a time glistening with anxiety. So much anxiety that innumerable books, podcasts, and political movements have all sprung up to teach us how to be human in a dehumanizing world. It seems everyone is just trying to figure out how to do the basics again. Breathe. Sleep. Eat. Rest. Avoid getting hit by the shit truck. 

How are we meant to shed ancestral trauma, save the world, and believe in a beautiful future, when daily life feels so overwhelmingly full of chaos? When apparently none of us is even breathing correctly?! 

What could I possibly have to say to you, except adulthood sucks. Stay where you are! So I figured, I’d just give some nihilistic speech about how nothing matters and you just have to survive as long as you can.

But then I spent a few days floating down the Chama river. And my nervous system relaxed. I started to co-regulate with the vibrant pulsating natural world. I put my phone away and stared at the impossibly beautiful rock walls for hours. One day, we found a map in the river, stuck between willow branches. It was faded, wrinkled and waterlogged. “This is a pirate map” someone said. “It is special.” 

And I thought, life is very much like a river trip. And the best way to navigate a river is with intuition, patience, and a good map. I know your class had to miss the river trip because of covid, one of many disruptions you endured during the pandemic. 

Since you didn’t get to go on your river trip, I want to share with you my pirate map for navigating the cosmic river that is life. 

First of all, lose track of time. On the night before our put in, we were waiting for the rest of our boating party to show up. We began to worry, wondering why they were so late, and then my friend Redbeard said, “If we lose track of time, they will be here soon” Factually accurate. As soon as we dropped into the moment, became present, lost track of time, they arrived. 

When you are on the river, the people you are with become your family. River trips are co-created. We were all 97% prepared and we covered each others missing or forgotten 3%. We ate well on this river trip because it was a collective effort. Each of us was only responsible for a few of the meals, which meant we put extra care into making these meals delicious. Which meant every meal we ate was delicious because everyone put in the extra effort when it was their time.

Like your class, it’s almost as if you become one organism with many individual tendrils. Community like this never goes away. It may morph or change, with time and distance, but these connections have formed, and continue to form, who you are. Your identity is made by these people and places. Find your people wherever you go. Then weave these chosen families together to create a tapestry of support for both the inevitable joys and hardships of life. Continue to collectively feed each other. You may leave pieces of yourself behind, but you will continue to gain new pieces in new places, with new people as you go.

At the same time, personal flotation devices are important. Find yours. Whatever keeps you afloat in the rapids. One night, as we sat around the fire, we talked about the difficult years we had had. One man mentioned he had been caring for one relative after the next and never felt like he had a break to care for himself.

After each round of his intense story, we paused and took a deep breath. We sent love out our hands and looked at the wild sky exploding with stars. Maybe your personal flotation device is simply breathing. You may think it's silly to have to do this. Shouldn’t breathing be automatic? But sometimes you have to do it more consciously. When you talk of heavy things, take a breath. When you laugh until you are crying, take a breath.

Ready. Let’s try it. Breath in. Breath out.

Life is hard and catastrophe is inevitable. You will fall off the boat and struggle to get back on. In fact some days, it will feel impossible. Accept this. Wait a few minutes. Take a deep breath. Continue on. Nothing will feel as sweet as finding yourself back on that floating oasis. Push yourself beyond your comfort zones, knowing you can always rely on your life vest. 

Life will also sometimes trap you in eddies. You can fight to escape but I recommend taking them as an opportunity to rest. The fallow periods and the grief are necessary. We used to have collective rituals and ceremonies to grieve because life is full of loss. Lost opportunities, lost friends and relatives, lost experiences and periods of our lives due a global pandemic. What underlays all of this is grief. It is its own psychedelic state. And it contains its own wisdom. Do not turn away from it.

Grief will spin you around and around. It will make you dizzy. Accept you are in a whirlpool and find the energy in grief. Notice how gratitude springs up. Gratitude for clean drinking water. For morning sun on your face. For bird song, even if the birds are endangered and disappearing. This is how grief weaves its magic: it shows us that even in the most difficult moments, all is not lost. Be patient. The eddy will spit you out eventually, returning you to the current with renewed love and courage.

One afternoon, my friend David spent a few hours in a slot canyon having an encounter with an owl. “That owl stared into my soul and saw me in a way I’ve never been seen before", he said When he came back to camp, he took off all his clothes, declaring “I am a new man!”, and then accidentally fell into the river. What a baptism!

Whenever you are sad or lonely or terrified or confused, go sit under a tree. Breath with the tree. Notice the ants. Have an encounter with a bird. Fall in love with the earth every day so that you may fall in love with yourself. Turn your phone off and talk to strangers, get lost without your gps, admire the sunset fully instead of snapping a quick photo. Sleep outside. Drink plenty of water. We can always renew ourselves when we commune with the natural world. 

One day on the river, we did pretty much nothing. We lay on the boats in the sun like lizards until we were heated through and then we jumped in the icy waters, screaming, only to repeat the process again. River trips are hard work and so it’s important to prioritize rest. To find the Sweetness in life. One of the heaviest pieces of gear we brought was a dry bag full of costumes. It weighed nearly 70 pounds, full of sparkly pants and shirts, wigs and scarves, and flowy dresses. Each night we would put on a new costume. Men painted each others toenails. We reinvented our identities. We played. We sat around the fire and made up songs. 

It's so important to honor your body. You are a mammal. And mammals need good food and good rest, exercise, hard work, and lots of play. Dance as much as you can. Dance with friends in dark clubs, and alone in your kitchen and your car. Dance with strangers on the street and with lovers next to rivers. Dance for 30 seconds or three hours. Dancing will keep you fit. It increases energy, moves stuck emotion, prevents dementia, boosts your immune system, and stimulates creativity. Dancing is one of the many gifts of being a human, of having an unruly body. It is somatic medicine. Our ancestors have been celebrating life and healing themselves through dance for millennia. Your DNA demands that you dance regularly.

At the same time, honor your mind. It’s probably an alien, trapped on this random planet inside a silly meatsuit. Have compassion for your mind. It is just trying to regulate your hormones and the influence of the stars, while keeping track of over 60,000 thoughts a day!

Sometimes on the river, you will pass by your intended spot. The current will be too swift. You can’t get the rope to shore in time. Keep building trust in yourself. This will be a challenge. Life will throw you a million ways to doubt yourself. It is a daily lifelong practice to trust yourself. Your thoughts, your body, your intuition. But by trusting yourself you will come to trust the universe. The divine timing, the unfolding of one moment to the next. Don’t rush. It will all happen just as it does. You will come to shore soon enough. 

I don’t believe in “finding your authentic self” because the self is constantly changing. One might feel authentic in one moment, and in the next, the truth of who you are will be vastly different. Instead, I urge you to be present as much as possible. Whether the river is running high or low, it is never the same river for long. Watch the torrents of your mind, of a body constantly feeling one thing to the next, and notice what you notice. Be present to the great joys and the deep sorrows. This is where life is. It is not in the achievements or the accumulation. You’ve heard this wisdom before, over and over again, from the most ancient scholars to the new age influencers. It is cliché because it is true. 

And so instead I will tell you to follow your curiosity. Spend your life asking questions. When you give advice—to yourself and others—pose it as queries. Nobody has any idea what they are doing. Especially the people that act like they do. This is all just a giant experiment. So follow your curiosity. Follow your joy. Explore the tributaries. And it’s always ok to change course. 

Finally, I wish to tell you that you are not broken. That you do not need to be fixed. That the world is also not broken and does not need to be fixed either. How can I say this when there is so much injustice? When the eco-dread is real? When what we need is collective action, but instead we are being sold personal development as the next great fountain of youth  Just meditate daily. Or say this mantra. Or take this supplement for good skin and manifestation. Hashtag blessed. 

It’s true that sometimes your boat will get a hole and start to deflate. It needs to be patched. But this does not mean it is broken. The boat just requires restoration to keep going. The origins of the word restore mean to "to build up again, repair; renew” but also “to give back.” Learn how to restore yourself, to repair and renew in such a way that you are also repairing and renewing each other and the planet. 

Take lessons in how to do this from the spring renewal, from life’s constant regeneration. Give birth to yourself over and over again. 

Remember—you are a living being, cycling in and out of growth and decay, expansion and contraction. Just like the river. Nonlinearity is normal. Some days you will feel like you haven’t made any progress. Or worse, that you've gone backwards, and you will worry you don't have the life force to try again. But even when you feel stuck in your old patterns, you have changed and grown in innumerable small ways. Celebrate the imperceptible wins. When you go to bed at night, say to yourself “I did it!”Congratulate yourself on making it through another day. On finding something to love even amidst the heartbreak. 

The world is not ending, not broken, but it is certainly transforming. Rapidly, violently. All this change is destabilizing. Anxiety inducing. But it also breaks open new realms of possibility. A flood can be a force of destruction but it is often necessary to help germinate the seeds of new life.

The grief and the scars and the difficult work will always be there. Side by side with the joy and the jokes and the love. You must learn to hold these opposing states of being simultaneously. Constantly coming together and falling apart. Laugh as much as you cry. Both are necessary for survival. 

Breath in. Breath out. Birth and death a thousand times a day. And again.

Ultimately, the river guides you. Become people of God. Find your magic. Find your talismans, your charms, your worry dolls. Your cross. Your guiding star. Whether it’s tarot or astrology. Whether it is the magic of math or ecology, find your way of praying to the unknown and stick with it. Build an altar and visit it daily. Feed it with your fears and wishes. Put fresh flowers there when you desire to speak to an ancestor or ask Spirit for some wisdom. Find your faith. Not a blind faith but a faith in yourselves to weather the storms. Feel your difficult feelings so that you may be truly present with them. Offer your prayers to the water. This way you will always return to hope. Make maps to this place of peace. Let the river guide you back.

No one knows what to expect from a river trip. Even if you’ve run it before, it’s never the same river. So as you walk across this stage today, to celebrate all the hard work you and your community have done to get here, remember, you already have the wisdom inside you to live an open-hearted and adventurous life.

Let the river guide you. Find your pirate maps along the way. And all will be well.

Congratulations Class of 2023!