There's a particular kind of aliveness that arrives when I'm outside long enough for my body to forget what it's supposed to be doing. Not exercising or optimizing. Not tracking steps, progress, or outcomes. Just being in motion.
I've been noticing how rare that feels. How much of life gets shaped into usefulness before we've even had a chance to experience it. A hike becomes training. Movement becomes discipline. Joy becomes something to account for.
I've been sitting with a question lately: What would it mean to let some of it go unaccounted for?
I think about following a muddy path without checking where it leads, touching the bark of a tree without needing a reason, or letting my pace slow as my attention wanders toward the birds. There's something about being outside long enough that the body stops performing and starts perceiving. The light changes and you notice it. The ground is uneven and you adjust. Something moves at the edge of your vision and you turn toward it.
Not because you should. Just because you want to.
Nature doesn't ask me to be coherent or productive or even particularly self-aware. She doesn't require me to make meaning out of every moment. I can simply be there, and something in my body begins to respond. A loosening, a softening, a quiet curiosity that doesn't need to know where it's going. I can breathe a little differently. There's freedom in that.
I've been thinking about how rarely we extend that same permission to ourselves.
We are nature, after all. The same expressiveness that moves through a forest in early morning, the way everything is constantly becoming, shedding, reaching, and resting, moves through us, too. We are not separate from it, although we've learned to live as though we are.
adrienne maree brown writes about pleasure as political, as something that can help orient us toward what feels nourishing, expansive, and alive. I keep returning to that idea. The possibility of listening to what draws us toward something, of allowing desire and curiosity to offer information rather than immediately questioning whether they are reasonable or useful.
I think about what it means to try something on. A different way of dressing. A different way of moving through a room. Something we've been curious about but haven't quite allowed ourselves to reach for yet.
There's something in that reaching that can't be discovered through thinking alone. Sometimes we need to put something on, feel it against our skin, move around in it, and notice what happens. We might discover something that feels unexpectedly familiar or something that doesn't fit quite the way we imagined. Either way, we've learned something through the experience of trying.
And maybe that's enough.
Gender, expression, and the ways we inhabit ourselves are not puzzles that need to be solved. They can be vast spaces to wander, to experiment, to return to, and to experience differently over time. I find something comforting in that possibility, particularly when so much of the world insists that we should know exactly who we are and be able to explain it.
Queerness has always offered me another way of imagining this. Not as a third option or another box to check, but as an openness to ways of being that don't necessarily follow the paths laid out for us.
Nature is full of this kind of variation. Bodies change, adapt, take unexpected forms, and exist in relationships that resist our tidy categories. The more attention I pay to the living world, the less interested I become in treating difference as something that needs to be explained away.
We are expansive and complex beings. We are nature, and nature is queer.
I think the same curiosity belongs in our experiences of desire and intimacy. In the tender, sometimes fumbling space of being close to another body, there's so much we might discover if we weren't always trying to get somewhere.
So much of how we're taught to approach sex and connection is goal-oriented. There's a destination, a performance, a right way to arrive. We're given expectations about what pleasure should look like, how desire should unfold, and what counts as a successful sexual experience.
So… boring.
What interests me is what happens when we allow more room for exploration. When we linger with a sensation because it feels good, or try something simply because we're curious. When we can laugh, change our minds, ask for something different, or discover that what we thought we wanted isn't quite what we want after all.
Desire doesn't always arrive with a clear set of instructions. Sometimes it unfolds through attention, through being with ourselves or another person without needing to know exactly where the experience is headed.
I think of water moving through a landscape, finding its way around stones, gathering in unexpected places, sometimes rushing and sometimes barely moving at all. There's something appealing about approaching pleasure with that kind of openness, allowing ourselves to respond to what we discover rather than insisting on a particular destination.
Of course, curiosity also involves discernment. Our bodies carry histories, fears, habits, and expectations alongside pleasure. Not every sensation is an instruction, and not every desire needs to be acted upon. But I wonder what might change if we approached those experiences with a little less judgment and a little more interest in what they have to tell us.
I'm reminded of CAConrad's work with somatic rituals and attention, the invitation to engage with sensation, environment, and experience in ways that interrupt our ordinary habits of perception. I appreciate the possibility of encountering our bodies without immediately trying to interpret or organize everything we feel.
There is something quietly radical about making room for experiences that don't have to become anything more than what they are.
I keep returning to this across so many parts of my life. The freedom to try without needing certainty. To notice what feels inviting and what doesn't. To allow something to change without immediately needing to explain what that change means.
Our bodies are capable of remarkable curiosity, but we've also learned to question, discipline, and sometimes distrust what we experience. Reconnecting with ourselves isn't always as simple as listening to an inner voice that already has all the answers. Sometimes we have to become familiar with sensations we've spent years ignoring. Sometimes we need safety, support, or time before exploration feels possible.
And sometimes we just need permission to play.
Permission to not know yet. To try something without it meaning anything final. To change our minds, follow an unexpected interest, or enjoy an experience without turning it into a declaration about who we are.
I like thinking about this as a way of being in process, the way the natural world is always in process. Not necessarily moving toward some perfected version of ourselves, but responding to what we encounter, what we need, and what we're curious enough to explore.
I don't have a clean ending for this. Only a noticing that something in me feels different when I allow for even a few moments of this kind of openness.
Not transformed. Not healed. Just a little more here, a little more curious about what might happen next.
Yours with playful curiosity,
