Pre-verbal is the place where the body was yet a green-blue energy greening, greened, and bluing the stone, the floodwaters, the razorback fish, the beetle, and the cottonwoods’ and willows’ shaded shadows.

Pre-verbal was when the body was more than a body and possible.

One of its possibilities was to hold a river within it.

~

A river is a body of water. It has a foot, an elbow, a mouth. It runs. It lies in a bed. It can make you good. It remembers everything.

~

America is a land of bad math and science: the Right believes Rapture will save them from the violence they are delivering upon the earth and water; the Left believes technology, the same technology wrecking the earth and water, will save them from the wreckage or help them build a new world on Mars.

~

If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, how can I say who I am if the river is gone?

What does ’Aha Makav mean if the river is emptied to the skeleton of its fish and the miniature sand dunes of its dry silten beds?

If the river is a ghost, am I?

Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.

~

A phrase popular or more known to non-natives during the Standing Rock encampment was, Water is the first medicine. It is true.

Where I come from we cleanse ourselves in the river. Not like a bath with soap. I mean: the water makes us strong and able to move forward into what is set before us to do with good energy.

We cannot live good, we cannot live at all, without water.

If we poison and use up our water, how will we cleanse ourselves of these sins?

~

To thirst and to drink is how one knows they are alive, and grateful. To thirst and then not drink is . . . ~ If your builder could place a small red bird in your chest to beat as your heart, is it so hard for you to picture the blue river hurtling inside the slow muscled curves of my long body? Is it too difficult to believe it is as sacred as a breath or a star or a sidewinder or your own mother or your lover? If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined? The Whanganui River in New Zealand now has the same legal rights of a human being. In India, the Ganges and Yamuna rivers now have the same legal status of a human being. Slovenia’s constitution now declares access to clean drinking water to be a national human right. While in the US, we are tear-gassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling natives who are trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock in North Dakota. We have yet to discover what the effects of lead-contaminated water will be on the children of Flint, Michigan, who have been drinking it for years. ~ We think of our bodies as being all that we are: I am my body. This thinking helps us disrespect water, air, land, one another. But water is not external from our body, our self. My Elder says: Cut off your ear, and you will live. Cut off your hand, you will live. Cut off your leg, you can still live. Cut off our water: we will not live more than a week. The water we drink, like the air we breathe, is not a part of our body but is our body. What we do to one—to the body, to the water—we do to the other. ~ Toni Morrison writes, All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Back to the body of earth, of flesh, back to the mouth, the throat, back to the womb, back to the heart, to its blood, back to our grief, back back back to when we were more than we have lately become. Will we soon remember from where we’ve come? The water.

And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other, better and cleaner? Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do? —Natalie Diaz

Advice to Myself #2: Resistance

Resist the thought that you may need a savior,

or another special being to walk beside you.

Resist the thought that you are alone.

Resist turning your back on the knife

of the world’s sorrow,

resist turning that knife upon yourself.

Resist your disappearance

into sentimental monikers,

into the violent pattern of corporate logos,

into the mouth of the unholy flower of consumerism.

Resist being consumed.

Resist your disappearance

into anything except

the face you had before you walked up to the podium.

Resist all funding sources but accept all money.

Cut the strings and dismantle the web

that needing money throws over you.

Resist the distractions of excess.

Wear old clothes and avoid chain restaurants.

Resist your genius and your own significance

as declared by others.

Resist all hint of glory but accept the accolade

as tributes to your double.

Walk away in your unpurchased skin.

Resist the millionth purchase and go backward.

Get rid of everything.

If you exist, then you are loved

by existence. What do you need?

A spoon, a blanket, a bowl, a book—

maybe the book you give away.

Resist the need to worry, robbing everything

of immediacy and peace.

Resist traveling except where you want to go.

Resist seeing yourself in others or them in you.

Nothing, everything, is personal.

Resist all pressure to have children

unless you crave the torment of joy.

If you give in to irrationality, then

resist cleaning up the messes your children make.

You are robbing them of small despairs they can fix.

Resist cleaning up after your husband.

It will soon replace having sex with him.

Resist outrageous charts spelling doom.

However you can, rely on sun and wind.

Resist loss of the miraculous

by lowering your standards

for what constitutes a miracle.

It is all a fucking miracle.

Resist your own gift’s power

to tear you away from the simplicity of tears.

Your gift will begin to watch you having your emotions,

so that it can use them in an interesting paragraph,

or to get a laugh.

Resist the blue chair of dreams, the red chair of science, the black chair of the humanities, and just be human.

Resist all chairs.

Be the one sitting on the ground

or perching on the beam overhead

or sleeping beneath the podium.

Resist disappearing from the stage,

unless you can walk straight into the bathroom and resume the face,

the desolate face, the radiant face, the weary face, the face

that has become your own, though all your life

you have resisted it.

—Louise Erdrich