Kami in the Rain
"You can only suffer being cold if you desire to be warm." - Reverend Blue Sky
"I feel like RYAWR!" I tell Kellen. "It's a mixture of excitement and disbelief. I'm not sure I've felt this way before!" I woke up to Du Hast and snow on the hill tops just a few minutes ago. My language upon peeling myself out of my sleeping bag and joining the group isn't fit to print.
As the minutes tick down, we shed layers and huddle around a roaring fire. I slip on a home-made linen shift, the only torso covering I have that isn't my wool long underwear or a sweater. The men stand barefoot, or booted, otherwise clad only in brightly colored boxer shorts. I wonder if they brought these ridiculous shorts intentionally, expecting a cold plunge to be part of the experience somehow. Grey has been repeating "Polar Plunge?" in a joking way for at least two days. I'm not sure he actually expected us to take him up on it.
In any case, clothing is more of a courtesy than a help--nothing we wear is going to keep us warm in the next few minutes. Wardruna's album Yggdrasil booms out through the low mist over a bluetooth speaker we've managed to keep out of the incessant pattering of rain. The low chanting in Norse to a background of drumming builds up a thrumming inside my chest. A poll of the group reveals that we're all experiencing a similar level of excitement and, perhaps, trepidation.
As one, we leave the partial shelter of our canopy at the Flying M Upper Homestead Campground and sprint across the squelchy mud towards the pond. Without glasses, everything softens and blurs and I run, mistakenly, across our campground hosts' front yard while yelling "I AM A WARRIOR!" I hope my dramatic enthusiasm was entertaining for them. I hope they were awake already.
We reach the reservoir, a built up oval pond in the center of the campground screened by trees and framed by the North Yamhill River on one side and a country road on the other. We jump up and down, jog in place, clap our hands, huff our breaths, hearts pounding as steam wreathes our heads and peels off in reams from our bare shoulders. We huddle, perched on a little square of 8 x 8 ft concrete on the Northwest side of the pond, waiting with baited breath to see who will go first. We stand, too, on the precipice of life as we have known it. Civilized humans do not jump into freezing ponds in their underwear in January. (Freezing? There weren't even ice chunks in it! - Grey).
Reverend Blue Sky is the first to jump in, emerging from the water with primal yells and his hair plastered onto his face in rivulets. We follow him, one by one, emerging without thought from the frigid black, reaching in succor for the ladder on the side of the pond. I climb out and jam my feet, still wet, into my boots, then jump up and down feeling every nerve ending along my arms and legs, my shift sticking to my torso like clammy saran wrap. I envy the men their underwear--I reckon they are warmer than me--but I don't feel cold. Everything is hot, burning, bright. My skin, my mind, my eyes. I am a towering, twisting pillar of green and orange flame, rising up above the pond to join in the rain, the mist, the steam.
Three of us stand on the platform in the aftermath of our plunge and perform a kind of dance, a Japanese Shinto purification ritual often performed in running water. The ritual isn't new to us, we three have stood in the Pacific Ocean together twice before on earlier trips and spun this dance. Today is different, though. Before, we were at the beach. It was warm, sunny, our prolonged ocean dips were refreshing, not daring. The group is different, closer knit, more open, reflective. I am different, too, my own burgeoning awareness of energy, intention, soul, expanding out from my courageous kiai into the moisture-laden air around us. The water--in the pond, in the air, in my body--resonates in a way that still fills me with energy at the memory of it.
I have been compressed, in this culture, in the work I have done, in my relationships. No more. I stand in the rain on the shore of a freezing pond, dressed in a dripping linen shift, feeling every ounce of my power. I leave my fear and my pain on the dock as I jump into the water, as my kiai reverberates up into the sky. I claim my soul, I take it back, I become myself, and I become, too, a part of this group, this little circle brought together by fate and circumstance and choice, these souls who are on this journey with me, at least for a time.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night. - Dylan Thomas
