Body of Water - Part One

This film is an early threshold, but not a singular one.

Created during my time at Schumacher College as part of the Movement, Mind, and Ecology program, it traces the beginning of a relationship that would come to shape everything that followed. What you are witnessing is not a finished body of work, but an initiation unfolding across geographies, across bodies of water, across ways of listening that were only just beginning to take form.

The River Dart is one of the primary presences in this piece, a guide that opened the first doorway into perceiving water as teacher, as intelligence, as something with which a relationship can be cultivated. But it is not the only one.

Over the course of three years, this inquiry moved through many waters. It extended into the warm, untamed edges of the Central Pacific coast of Costa Rica, where rivers, tidepools, and waterfalls became sites of direct encounter and communication. It returned me to the Atlantic Ocean along the shores of Ocean City, where early imprints of relationship with water were re-met and re-felt. Each location offered a different texture of listening, a different way the body could be shaped by current, by gravity, by temperature, by the unseen life moving within and around it.

There was, throughout this time, a quiet but steady intention to make contact, particularly with waterfalls, to meet water not only as landscape, but as presence, as voice. Much of what you see here emerges from that intention, from a willingness to approach without knowing what would be returned.

Looking back now, I recognize this film as a first chapter within a much longer unfolding.

At the time of its making, I had not yet encountered Aguahara, the practice that would deepen and refine this inquiry into a more sustained relational field. That work belongs to what I now understand as a second phase, one in which the initial initiation begins to take shape as practice, as skill, as something that can be entered again and again with increasing sensitivity.

This piece holds the beginning, not as a single moment, but as a series of openings across waters, each one calling the body further into relationship.

Part one of a longer conversation.