Desire is the nervous system’s movement toward what it cares about, the impulse to reach before the mind has found its reasons. What’s notable here isn’t the absence of struggle. It’s that the body reaches anyway, leaning into the weather rather than letting it decide, and that leaning is its own kind of aliveness.
You cannot ruminate mid-plunge. The nervous system doesn’t have bandwidth left for anything but the here and now. That’s the same demand Ripples makes of love: not a state you ease into, but a shock you enter fully, which is precisely what clears the noise and tells you, unmistakably, that you’re alive in it.
I would go into the woods behind my house. I’m not sure if I was escaping, exactly — I think what I craved was predictability, and the woods had it.
A poem for my children, and the Rockwell Kent painting that inspired it.