Hi friends,
I’m writing this from home, but part of me is still on the river.
I just returned from 22 days rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The experience was nothing short of life-changing, deeply inspiring and reorienting.
While traveling 280 river miles beneath the towering rock layers, we joked that we were the “nomadic river people”. We had no service, no schedule, no real sense of time beyond the sun rising and setting. Our days were simple- wake up, make coffee & breakfast, pack camp, get on the water, float, hike, eat, laugh, sleep. Over and over again.
It took me a while to ease into the experience and surrender to the wind, the sand, the constant exposure, the lack of control. I brought things I thought I would need, like a full dry bag with matcha supplies I intended to use daily… turns out around day 3, I realized that any extra work was not worth it and black coffee would be just fine. It didn’t take me long to realize how unnecessary most of these extra things, routines, that I once thought were nonnegotiable, truly were.
The canyon has a way of stripping everything bare. The same fine sand that ground down and exfoliated my skin was shaping the cliffs above me. To become part of a place, we have to endure the harsh sun that pushes red ocotillo blooms from their spindly stalks and lures the rattlesnakes out from their dens. We need the wind to remind us of its power, as it pushes our boats and keeps us awake at night. The same blessed blue waters that would hold us as we bathed, would roar up into perilous white rapids, elucidating our prayers and comradery. The challenges, while uncomfortable, were what initiated us as a part of the canyon. Anything extra or unnecessary fell away, leaving behind only the most essential, simple parts of being human.
As an herbalist, the plant life was ever changing, diverse and rich. Moving deeper through desert ecosystems and watching the plants unfold at their peak colorful bloom. Yellow hillsides of Brittlebrush, red tipped Ocotillos, aromatic chaparral, flowering cacti and yucca sending up billowy white stalks… I was buzzing with excitement and love for the plants. To connect deeper with medicines that we steward in the apothecary, learn about new plant friends, and be a part of these rugged places that hold oases of plant diversity, was nothing short of transformational.
At the very beginning of the trip, Ariella (my friend & employee at the apothecary), invited us to offer some Hopi corn that she was gifted to the river. As we dipped our hands, powdery with yellow corn dust, in the emerald waters of the Colorado River, we stated our intentions for the journey. My intention for the trip was to receive.
In the last several years, my nervous system has been so revved up- with responsibilities, technology, to-dos. I have such a beautiful life with loved ones that enrich my days, a bright home that my husband and I built with our own hands, a quiet forested backyard, an apothecary brimming with medicinal plants and genuine people, work filled with purpose. And yet, it has been challenging to connect to, and actually receive this beauty as of late.
Beauty is a nervous system state. From growing up in a family that idolized beauty, to dealing with severe skin issues throughout my life, I have had to unpack what beauty really means to me. When I attune to the beauty around me, by looking at jutting cliffs against blue sky or smelling freshly blooming lilacs, there is a feeling that softens within me. My heart opens, and I am able to let in the joy and pleasure the beauty brings. When I am stressed, I don’t even notice the beautiful things, smells, sounds around me. This leads me to recenter physical human beauty as nothing aesthetic, because we rarely actually care what anyone else looks like. What we care about is how people make us feel.
When we are in a receptive state we can actually engage with and take in the beauty around us. We can feel the beauty of the world, the beauty of the blooming cactus, the beauty of sun on skin and sleeping bags under the stars. So that is why my intention was to receive. I wanted my nervous system state to shift and absorb the beauty of the canyon like I was being immersed by it. I wanted to receive the milky way like it was cream in my coffee, I wanted to receive the echos we called into a slot canyon like they were drums of my heartbeat. I wanted to receive the beauty of the canyon as medicine for my soul.
At moments when the canyon tested me, when the (extremely male dominated) group dynamics wore me down, when the heat radiating off the lava rocks felt like too much to bear, I would center back into “receive”. This simple reminder, to soften into the beauty around me, to laugh with all those sweet boys, to let the black lava rocks bring forth a phoenix within me.
The Grand Canyon is a place, the most sacred profound place I have ever been… yes, but these lessons and reminders can exist wherever you are. Can you soften and receive the beauty of the tree blooming in your backyard? Can you take something extra off your plate? Can you get off social media, and tune into the technology of your body, the Earth?
These are all of the questions I am pondering as I return home. Laughing at myself as I lovingly gather Grand Canyon sand, which I once resisted, from the corners of my drybags to place on my altar.
If you want to hear this full story in my own voice, with all the nuance, details, and reflections from the river, you can listen to the full solo podcast episode that I recorded about it here:
With love & Grand Canyon sand,
Elliott
