April 2025
WOTY Reflections on Rivers breaking up for Spring
I truly did not know what RIVER would bring as a word of the year this year. So many of my words have been verbs, have been words that make actionable sentences, in past years. But RIVER was not totally new to me. I was born along a river and I return to water to settle.
MANY years ago, I listened to the Hypnobabies series [a self-hypnosis program] many times during my first pregnancy. There is a part of this process where you identify a word to think or say or have others say alongside a gestural/physical trigger to remind your body to shift into a relaxed state. My word then was RIVER. Just as this year, it came to me almost effortlessly, popping into my mind.
The most relaxed I’ve ever been in my memory is a false fall afternoon (that is, felt like fall but was really still summer) when I floated on an air mattress northward along the shore of the Columbia and the cottonwoods were fluttering against the bluest of blue skies. Every one of my senses was held gently. The air was just right - warm and comforting at the same time. The water rocked me gently. The sights were made up of primary colors. I imagine I was neither hungry nor thirsty, and probably was at the lake because I’d had a busy day and now had time to relax.
This month was hard for some reasons I’ll not go into, with little to no true moments of relaxation for any of my senses.
WOTY Playlist, April Edition
I had to get my car fixed this month. A scary incident on a freeway on-ramp filled me with gratitude for my almost 10-year relationship with my auto mechanic and my used car. The mechanic talked me down and through the right next steps, and luckily I was able to drive to the mechanic and have the old (read: PAID OFF) car fixed for far less than a down payment on a new one. I take my old car for granted at times, so I looked at it with loving eyes and reminded myself of what is unique beyond what a good-sized car it is for me.
(Side note: While driving my daughter in my wife’s car this month, she said “You make this car look so tiny!” This was such a validating statement. Earlier in the month, I had shared with some folks I’ve only ever met online when I finally met them in person that “I’m an enormous person, it gives me an experience of never being able to fade to the background,” and more than one person denied my reality. I think they meant to assuage a pain, but its not a pain for me, its’s something I love about myself. This is who I am — enormous, taking up space, the ability to choose power from gentleness because I am allowed physical power — I have truly never walked through a dark parking garage with my keys laced in my fingers — I know that to be a rare experience for a woman in racialized gendered capitalist supremacy — its one of many ways I can see and experience the future I dream for all of us.)
So I cleaned my care up when it came back home all fixed. And I put back into it the three folios of CDs I still own! My car is now the only place they can be played at my house. And I’ve been listening to Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints, a CD I bought in one of those ads in the back of the weekly newspaper inserts in the late 1990s. And here is the new River Playlist Song for April:
This whole album is a series of poems set to music and my favorite stanzas in this song are these:
And I believe in the future
We shall suffer no more
Maybe not in my lifetime
But in yours I feel sure
…
and
…
And sometimes even music
Cannot substitute for tears
These pieces of poetry ring true for me. I trust the whole playlist will continue to support the year, with whatever it brings.
Spring Break Up
Another thing that Rivers do, seasonally, is freeze up and break up.
One big reflection for 2025 has been the recognition of a pretty long-standing pattern. Last fall, I was aware as I moved from an active state to a hibernating one as the days became darker in a way I had not been aware before. I still berated myself for this descent and tried to insert some other activity to change it. For a couple of weeks as it got darker, I went swimming in the mornings. But it didn’t last.
This year, this April, as the light returns enough for me to go for a walk in the morning, I see this as a seasonal pattern rather than a character flaw. My core intention to love all, anyway, had not been loving me, anyway, when I was berating myself for ‘quitting’ walking and then ‘quitting’ the swimming I attempted to replace it with.
But just like frozen rivers are still there under the ice, I’m suddenly becoming more active again. More like a plant perhaps than a river — if you are a long-time reader, you know my core writing tool is metaphor and I mix them maybe too much.
Here I am, leaving April like a seed that suddenly, miraculously put up a shoot, like a river that suddenly, somewhat inexplicably, transitioned from mostly frozen to mostly moving.
At the same time, I heard a whisper for next year. At only one-third of the way through this year, it might seem early, but I like to listen to whispers. Maybe this spring time waking up has inside of it the blooms and future seeds that come from those already in a dreamstate. I’m keeping notes. And just believing that this routine will continue into another year (and for me, into another decade) is a tiny act of hope. Things are a bit of a mess for many reasons right now, and we may not be feeling hope, but the seeds bursting and rivers loosening remind us that this season, too, will pass.
How about you? Is a word still working with and through you this month? This year? Are you hearing any whispers calling you to another word for next year? Are you finding hope in the extension of the light into morning and evening?