Wherever the river may lead
Lessons from Sawyer: A wild slice of Texan magic 🌵✨
Names edited for privacy.
It shouldn't surprise you that I found myself on the San Marcos river yesterday.
True to form, I found my way to Texas (with my other adventurers at a global co-living community). It doesn't check boxes, but it checks mine. The community manager (adult camp counselor, really) posted an activity in the group chat that caught my eye. Go to the river! Be among the tourists! Go for a float. Ehhhh. Really? Really. Ok, done. I'll go.
To say I was wound a little tight would be an understatement.
I kept to myself. I cried on the short bus. A chance to fantasize about staying at Ashton Kutcher & Mila Kunis' place in Santa Barbara made me realize — I've been on the road so long, I don't even know which three friends I'd bring.
We can safely gloss over the lackluster journey from bar to bus to CVS pilgrimage to chit-chat with the couple from Kansas City, giggling along with the potbellied Australian in a floral shirt slamming WhiteClaws, popping a mushroom cap, floating by the Gen Z teens blaring rap, and endeavoring to stop trying to control so much.
Be here now. It's so simple! Yet so goddamn hard sometimes. The long and short of it is that I floated nearby two traveling Texans who — in gentle words, and tiny nudges, over a span of hours — became my river pals for the day. One of them nearly became my river boo for a timeless couple hours there, although it seems life had other plans. I'll tell you about it anyway.
His name is Sawyer. “LANG-IDGE!!!” That's Texan for, “Language!”. It translates loosely to, “Lyle, watch your word choice. There is a woman within earshot.” “Lang-idge, huh? Nice word choice.” He took a moment — and his head flung back in delight. A bright smile beaming in 108° heat on a warm river under a Texas sky. It was a beat. A morsel of intimacy — one step on push/pull/dance of coming together and drifting apart. LANG-IDGE! broke us into shared laughter — and my presence as a stranger became a little bit less strange. I floated on.
Travel has taught me, in no uncertain terms, the virtue and necessity of letting go. So, to my cling-tastic chagrin, I sat with wanting to be closer to the tanned, bright-smiled, football-slinging, loud-mouthed Texan wild child… and breathed air into that cling. And allowed the mushrooms and the river to carry me along.
We hadn't committed to the adventure yet. We chatted, yet weren’t locked into a day spent floating together. Small pleasantries, small pauses. The little pleasures and intrigues of witnessing strangers becoming friendlier.
I closed my eyes. Relaxed. And wound up in an eddy by some lilies, paused. Lyle and Sawyer caught up. This happened a few times. I let go. The river found ways to bring us back together.
Life seems like that. Some of us chase the future, assuming it's better out there. We go faster. There must be better stuff there, if I speed up! Yet the best stuff wasn't ahead of me, on the open river — it was behind me. Maybe the same was true for my trajectory off the river. I've judged the progression of my life timeline pretty thoroughly, from top to bottom — especially lately. I've gone from being mentored by my ad agency's CEO, to shadowing a “bright and shiny” NYTimes bestselling author, to dog-sitting for friends and strangers, to coaching celebrity-adjacents, to crashing in my parents' basement — again. It's one thing to say, “Hey, your circumstances don't reflect your value as a human.” It's quite another to live it, embody it, and have any sense that human worthiness can be measured by anything other than my beating heart.
And so, I fell a little bit in love with a tan man named Sawyer. He had a thick Texan accent. Everything he said sounded more fun. He declared he was from a town of 1,800 people — and that 90% of them suck. What do you like about the 10%? “I'm related to 'em.” We had a dynamic that makes no sense, yet totally works. He reminded me of the degenerate tendencies I love most about Missouri (my home state). Missour-uh, to some. Simple. Overtly unpretentious. What you see is what you get. Soulful. Easy wisdom, relational tendencies, loyal, a penchant for fun, and an unabashed love of a good time. Sawyer was fiercely loyal to Lyle, his float-mate.
We sang to Kid Rock & Sheryl Crow's Picture. My outstretched hand reached for what he had. "Share!" The hand-off sent our tubes swirling in circles. “Is this move the Texas Twirl?” “That's what we'll call it now.” He missed Lyle having a tree nut fall on his head, declaratively retribution from a squirrel he pissed off. The squirrel network was strong. He slept on the wrong squirrel's bench, and word traveled fast. He was a marked man, we decided. On the run for years. The squirrels knew he was coming and followed him down the San Marcos to exact their merciless revenge. One pecan. POW! Pew-pew! Bye, Lyle!!!! YER DONE! Feck you — and your absolute disregard for the terrain of Texan squirrels.
God it was a blast. The open-hearted curiosity about the world. The shared love of travel. How mushrooms helped him love the life he had and stop focusing on what he didn't. The bright smiles and full-bellied laughter. Unsolicited declarations and soliloquies about life, love, and family. “Blood doesn't make you family — love does.” He loves Lyle. He doesn't think it makes him weak to need someone, and he's glad to have Lyle for the dark times. Sharing the story of his genesis: his biological mother wound up in a tricky spot and, “like the Grinch” dropped him off at the hospital entrance and flew to the East Coast. He never knew her. He figured it out later. Tales about working in oil, and the “manly” environment there. The self-consciousness suggesting a hint of whatever lived beneath the surface when he shared that he did handy work for Dave and Buster’s. By the time he shared that he'd gotten off uppers after using for six years — and once with his father — it was sober, contextualizing, tragic, and pretty understandable.
And, without missing much, he'd be on to the next adventure. The magical moments descended into wine-drunk unfolding, with my river crush's vices emerging in full display as a group of fellow partiers floated nearby. I can't possibly imagine what prompted this, but I overheard him say to a man he'd known for all but ten minutes: “I've taken shits that look better than you!!!!”
It was too good. I just laughed. It was so strangely, wildly, perfectly lovable. This mess of a man knocked his friend's speaker off his float, for no apparent reason other than a simian impulse to make contact with the world and experience it make contact with him. I caught Lyle's backpack. The speaker was not so lucky. The music cut, and a river hum and our splashing and Lyle's sigh was all that was left. A portable speaker’s dying breath might’ve been Snoop, or something more obscure. It made no sound, as it found its next chapter at the bottom of the San Marcos river. Lyle: “I wish you wouldn't do stuff like that. When we get back, I'm taking you to BestBuy and you're buying me a new speaker.” This is what I fell in love with. In all our conflict-resolution courses, we worry about LANG-IDGE! And how to speak to one another. And what the correct thing is to say. In coaching. In relationships. In love. How do we use words to find our way back to one another? And to our hearts?
I fell in love with the acceptance and love they had for one another. As I floated downstream, away from the chaos, I saw Lyle take it upon himself to pour the rest of Sawyer’s wine into the river. “Nope. You've had enough.” He was frustrated. There were consequences. The relationship was — through all apparent sight — still perfectly intact.
When I see the internet wax poetic (and blast into one another's heads) all this nonsense about self-actualization, what I think we're really reaching for is:
Individuation
Aliveness
I believe that self-actualization in its exalted form is a bid to taste all that life has to offer: both through one's self, and through one's willingness to experience richer flavors of it. In its fallen form, self-actualization is a reach for control. “If I'm perfect enough, THEN you'll love me!”. Or maybe, for once — maybe the first time — I’ll finally feel safe. Lyle and Sawyer were a bold, highlighted, salient display that we have so much wrong — about ourselves, and about the world. We want individuation. Sawyer and Lyle were in character.
Sawyer asked if I had any nicknames. He nicknamed me R, for red. For my hair. He then asked me — tenderly — what I wanted to be called. There were moments of gentleness. “Hey, can I ask you a question that might be intrusive?” Sure! Shoot. “If you travel, how do you make that work financially?”. He was a force of nature, moving seamlessly from gentleness to sharing the romance of Lyle cutting his hair under the moonlight — to cutting it off with, “I'm not gay!”.
His virtues and vices were exalted.
This is what I mean by individuation: the best parts of him and the worst parts of him were on display for the world to see. And, in my inner world, as I witnessed it all, I couldn't help but wish for some of the same. I can be standoffish, ungrateful, hypocritical, regular critical, unintentionally snobbish, controlling, anxious, afraid, blunt, wishy-washy, lazy, cryptic, inconsiderate, oblivious, aloof, pedantic, shallow, spineless, cold, moody, reactive, impulsive, stubborn, grudge-bearing, pessimistic, mercurial, distracted, fickle, and a host of other vices I'd know better if I had a Lyle to routinely put me in my place. And: I can be radiant, light, magnetic, charismatic, disarmingly charming, welcoming, ebullient, effervescent, playful, imaginative, light, vulnerable, caring, lovable, loving, intimate, magical, muse-worthy, whimsical, wise, deep, mysterious, enchanting, direct, curious, affable, passionate, adaptable, encouraging, wild, free, soulful, tender, romantic, graceful, gracious, thoughtful, magical, surprisingly grounding, and many of the beautiful things I saw in Sawyer.
As I listened to him tell a story about how he used to think he was a misfit and got over it, I related — yet hadn't quite found my way to the other side. His town was a race he wasn’t. He felt like an outsider. The whole “given up mercilessly for adoption at birth” certainly couldn’t help. As he shared, the self-consciousness I've felt lately with my own autistic-ness presenced itself. Autism (and the long journey of becoming aware of what it is, what it isn't, how it works, what's endemic to who I am, what's learned, what's healable, and what it all means for my ability to form solid, loving, stable relationships as an adult heading into an unpredictable future….) has been on my mind lately. Like all of our “things”, it's a ride. Current GPS location: I have yet to cross the threshold from, “This is really hard” to “This makes me special and uniquely lovable and I'll find a way to turn it into a formidable strength more than the pair of crutches it feels like today”.
We were so different on the outside, but I knew his feeling so well on the inside. I don't know if everyone feels out of place sometimes, or if I'm just a magnet for the ones who do.
He saw me struggle to put words to something and asked if I had trouble describing how I felt too. And I said yeah. And he graciously gave me words for his understanding of those moments when words can't capture experience. And we sat there in the timelessness of it all, Sawyer and me.
Floating in waters, held by cypress trees, surrounded by turtles, and warmed beneath a Texas sun. Pebbles beneath our feet. Splashing around us.
If you're hoping for a fairytale ending, I regret to inform you you won't find one here. When a group of rowdy partiers intersected with our triad, and Sawyer began his descent, I separated myself. Lyle stayed.
The same dynamic out in the real world showed up in a tiny burst: come close! Go away. My tolerance for discomfort is ripe for extension. In deciding to distance myself from the drunk, shallow-seeming partiers deep, deep into their boozing timeline… I missed out on the chance to say goodbye. The last words I heard from Lyle were, “You're drifting away!” and “First impressions don't last…”. He might've meant for that to be about Sawyer, but it could've just as well been tailor-made for me too. My warm persona and free-spirited solo float revealed a kid who doesn't feel socially secure enough to hang close, ride it out, and choose togetherness over separation.
I was plucked from the river by our 20-something river guide: “Ma'am? The rest of your group's ready.” Oh! Shoot. My bad. The escapist fantasy came to an end. The dynamic, by most accounts, was spared from the more grounded implications of… say… homophobia, addiction, and my own menagerie of idiosyncratic tendencies. And whatever else would make less and less sense as the sunlight faded and the capitalistic goings-on took root.
We had fun.
Fun can be hard, when you let yourself get so good at feeling rigid and wronged.
So, then, there's you. My readers. What you take from this story without an agenda (other than to enliven you, and to liberate me (from yet one more layer of masking, performance, and pretending to be anyone other than myself)) will be uniquely your own. Maybe it's entertaining. Maybe it's annoying. Maybe you'll unsubscribe. Maybe you'll feel inspired to take a hike, go for a float, or really unplug. Maybe you'll be deeply concerned for my life, my choices, my lack of reservations seeing the beauty in someone who took uppers for six years on an oil field, and my deep desire to feel alive, to connect with strangers, and to float down Texan rivers on Thursdays. Maybe you'll see some goodness in me I don't see. Maybe you'll be surprised by how naive I am — or how green I am to the love's terrains. Maybe you won't be. What I took from that yesterday was… quite a bit. Two themes are: aliveness & individuation. Sawyer resonated more than any book I've read or course I've taken lately. In some ways, it was a classic romcom-grade worlds colliding fantasy. We want to indulge in the escape, just to see how it shakes out. For all the reasons we made no sense: we made perfect sense, perhaps because in our opposition, we found similarity.
As I floated away, drifting into a peaceful moment with the tail-end of a mushroom trip (and what's presumably the avoidant portion of my so-called attachment style), I saw Sawyer splashing in his tube, laughing, looking like a little slice of athletic, deeply tanned, chaotic Southern heaven beneath a sun-spotted bald cypress tree. Lyle patiently shaking his head with the resignation of a man who'd seen it all.
I want to choose to celebrate my vices loudly and proudly — and to welcome home my virtues in their full lightness, exaltation, and glory. To re-orient my compass towards that which feels alive, artful, rich, complex, and mystical. To get better at blending unconventional choices with conventional worlds, to live adventurously, and to allow the me beneath it all to celebrate her willingness to get off the sidelines and into the rivers of life.
It's taoist training, really.
And Jungian! My favorite.
Wishing you all well on your summer adventures — however romantic, mundane, tragic, wild, grounded, soulful, blasé, and free as you want them to be.
My memory's been crap lately, although my wish me for me is this: I hope I savor the beauty of a stranger holding my hand and spinning me around in the water in circles — like we were two-steppin' on a river bank in Texas. And I hope I let that lived experience touch the cells in my body, stroke my heart, and send me into the moments to come with a bit more light, vitality, and spirit.
With warmth from Austin, TX,
A.K.A. the Surface of the Sun,
Your adventurous friend,
Jung Marge
Why hello friend 🤗