I. The Rock Years
I was born in January, when the world feels most like a stone left out in the open—cold, echoing with its own silence. People talk about air signs as if they bloom upward, unburdened, but I arrived heavier than that. I remember childhood as a series of sediments: tiny grains pressed down by circumstance until they hardened into something like identity. We don’t choose our geology. Pressure chooses it for us.
Much later, I began reading about how geologists speak of rocks. How they say juvenile, mature, ancestral. How they admit, quietly, that stone behaves like a kind of slow creature. I found the academic voices of Cuadrado and Durán explaining that rocks have families in the language of science; they host, they twin, they descend. I read that and felt something shift. I wondered if all along I had been misnamed, not an air child but a daughter of bedrock.
As a kid, I was often treated like something foundational, expected to bear weight without complaint. The way Dillard describes a tree holding a winter hillside, or the way Hass looks at a river stone and sees the sleep of centuries. I carried things before I had words for them. A child isn’t meant to be a platform, but sometimes the earth demands it anyway.
There is a theory I love: two rocks rubbing together can make fire. Friction as ignition. I think memory works this way. Two selves (one frightened, one enduring), striking against each other in the dark until a small brightness leaps up. A life is shaped by these brief illuminations, like mica catching the sun.
Once, years later, I found myself in a landscape filled with stones. Not thrown stones, not stones of anger, but the quiet geologies—the kind that have been rained on for centuries until they shine with a soft, inward patience. I stood among them the way one stands among elders, listening for what endures.
What am I supposed to do with all this weight?
The question rose up like groundwater.
Geology has an answer: you build with it. Even an intrusive rock, one that forces itself into another, can become structure with time. Pressure is a kind of teacher. So I began making small architectures out of what I’d carried: towers of sedimented thought, little cairns of memory. Scaffoldings instead of walls. Not to keep anything out, but to climb above myself long enough to see the shape of the terrain.
It felt like a holy act, though I distrust that word. Maybe reverent is better. Or attentive, the way attention is a kind of prayer. The stones seemed to want witness. And I wanted to know how hardness moves through the world, how it softens at the edges. The world being “the clatter of its changes.” Rocks know this in their own slow grammar.
I think about all this when I remember that January in your living room. The two of us sitting close, as if the air between us were a hearth, warmth happening without flame. Outside, winter was thinning, loosening its icy syntax. The season turning toward its melt.
Thaw is another kind of remembering. Ice releases what it held rigidly in place. Water carries it away. Every year I brace for it: that rush of things becoming liquid, ungovernable. In geology, water is the great storyteller. It dissolves, transports, lays down layers of truth that can be read millions of years later.
I suspect memory is no different, less a narrative than a deposition.
Summer has always meant water to me. Its shimmer, its danger, its invitation to surrender. Water as solvent. Water as mirror. Water as the thing that rounds even the sharpest stones. Even bedrock, under the right conditions, is a little bit alive.
II. The Water Years
Water has always been the element I reached for: the restless one, the one that refuses to stay in the shape you give it. When I was younger, I didn’t have the words the theorists now use, the language of material agency, of new materialities: that matter isn’t passive, that it presses back, that it has its own urgencies and inclinations. But I think I felt it—felt the way water behaved like a will, not a thing. It touched the shore the way a thought touches the edge of a dream: gently, repeatedly, without asking permission.
Scholars say water is not an object so much as a relation—an event. A movement that gathers and disperses life. A collaborator in world-making. Reading this, I think of how, as a child, I sensed that water was alive in a way I couldn’t articulate. How it slid past my legs in the creek as if deciding something. How it listened.
Sometimes I imagine the Golden Gate Bridge not as a structure but as an instrument: thin metal held above the place where two immensities meet, human intention hanging over the body of a water that has shaped continents. People talk about it as a site of endings, but I’ve always thought of it as a threshold. A moment where the scale of the human collapses into the scale of the elemental. Not death, but dilation. A widening into something larger than breath.
Growing up, the world seemed obsessed with containment, especially of children. I remember losing the spelling bee on the word extraordinary, as if the word itself had been designed to test the elasticity of a small mouth. In my stubbornness, or maybe in an early understanding of my own materiality, I spelled something else entirely: an expletive, half-hearted, half-formed, my first resistance. Even that rebellion was misspelled. But it felt like the truest thing I’d ever said. A refusal to be molded.
I was told I belonged to air—Aquarius, fixed and lofty. But air was too forgiving. Too abstract. Water had muscle. It pushed. It made canyons. It rearranged the world. And I admired anything that could not be held.
At six, I asked my father to throw me into the deep end of the pool. Not as a dare, but as a kind of surrender: teach me the world by immersion. One moment I breathed air; the next, blue closed around me like a fist. The floatie slipped from my arm as if it wanted no part in rescue. I remember sinking, not panicking, just watching the surface ripple above me like another life. Maybe this is how water teaches: through pressure, through suspension, through the insistence that one must learn how to move in order to stay alive.
That was my first lesson in new materialities, though I didn’t know it then: that agency is not the property of humans alone; it is distributed. Shared. Water was not a backdrop to my body. It was an interlocutor, shaping me as I shaped toward it.
Later I would read that water “remembers,” “seeks,” “forgets,” “hungers,” and that these aren’t poetic accidents. They’re the cognitive scaffolds through which scientists describe a world that is more animate than we admit. The theorists say this language reveals something essential: that knowledge is always relational, always metaphorical, always braided with the body. We understand water because we, too, are mostly flowing, storing, dissolving, remaking.
This idea loosens something in me. To think that my own life has been a canal—a route dug by inherited forces, by pressures older than I can name, by moments of sudden flood. And also a route I’ve carved myself, sometimes deliberately, sometimes blindly. Water is both the path and the traveler.
If water has taught me anything, it is that transformation doesn’t announce itself. It seeps. It pools. It takes the shape of whatever holds it until the holding fails, and then it moves on. You do not become running water without rearrangement. Something in you must give—pressure, temperature, memory. The past dissolving just enough to let motion begin.
Becoming water is not a gentle practice. It asks you to inhabit uncertainty, to accept that your boundaries might shift, that your edges might blur. But in that liquidity I found a freedom I never found in stone or sky. To be alive is to be “held in the clarity of what is unfinished.” Water knows this. Water models it. And so, eventually, do I.
In learning to move like water, I discovered, surprisingly, a kind of flight—not above the world, but through it. A buoyancy made from letting go of solidity. A way of rising by yielding.
A way of living that does not fear the dissolve.
III. The Air Years
I did not realize I belonged to the sky until much later. Air arrived as demonstration: how a body might yield, might lean, might become conduit instead of fortress. Wind does not merely pass through; it sculpts. Like erosion sculpting stone, wind carves posture, alignment, trajectory—not in segments but in continuous motion.
When I was younger, I walked and ran up inclines I did not understand, felt the wind press against my chest as if testing me, measuring how firmly I balanced my foot, how flexed my ankle could be, how my spine would tilt to accommodate the push. Recent biomechanical work on locomotion in wind shows that when human bodies move in gusts, they adjust: they change stride, foot-fall, centre of mass, lean forward or backward, let the airstream become part of their momentum.
In that sense, walking is not just stepping—it is negotiation with atmosphere.
January, then, is not just a month—it is an aperture. A moth of a moment: soft, trembling, luminous toward heat. Light itself has an erosive power, not just metaphoric, but physical: photons warming skin, shifting micro-postures, causing tissues to respond. Wind and light both alter us. I had said stones saved me, and they did, they gave me refuge, but I always sensed there was something beyond the walls I had built, something expansive.
Something extraordinary.
In my twenties I wanted to thank art for something like locomotion in air: for turning cracks into impulses, mistakes into trajectory, sediment into flight. I wanted to become mineral and prism and air at once—something that could refract, reflect, transcend. It’s strange to want the sun’s brilliance when born under Aquarius; but maybe that is the paradox you carry when you have known water’s depth and now must also know air’s altitude.
My life has run on vertical vectors: pools that held me, elevators that lifted me, airports that carried me in flight. The biomechanics of motion in air tell us: to ascend you must adjust your centre of gravity; to let air carry you you must surrender rigid posture; to move with wind you must let inertia meet flow. My memory is made of those coordinates pointing up, as if the sky were the only place where those who nearly drowned learn to stand.
Light never arrives through symmetry. It filters through crooked doors, uneven paths, hairline fractures we feared would break us. And wind—wind is never gentle. It comes in shifts, in gusts, in sudden crosscurrents that ask you to lean, to yield, to become something other.
The theoretical frame says bodies and winds are entangled: you do not simply pass through the breeze. You become part of its conduit.
And maybe that is the subtle curriculum of the Air Years:
Learning to reconfigure the body so that the wind becomes less adversary and more collaborator. Understanding that posture, stride, tilt are not just functional but existential.
Letting the element once associated with detachment become the one in which you are most embodied.
Air taught me that release is not a soft collapse but an active un-holding: a letting go that rearranges the centre of mass, that invites a new vector, that reimagines what standing means. My body stopped being the anchor and became the sail. I walked into gusts and let the atmosphere carry the intention. I learned that altitude is not separate from depth—that the vertical line of ascent begins in the horizontal breadth of landing, in the footfall, in the unsteady step.
And in that understanding I found a different kind of ease; nothing dramatic, just the sense that I wasn’t rising away from things anymore, but rising with them. More like a shift in how the body leans into the world.
Becoming air didn’t mean losing substance; it meant learning to carry it lightly.
And so at last I could rest, not by stepping aside from gravity, but by stepping into its subtle partner, wind.