I once told someone that snowboarding was my first love.

I once told someone that snowboarding was my first love. 

People in the world of outdoor sports understand this because maybe their first love was running or surfing. 

They can wrap their head around the way a soul gets entangled with a thing like that.

Less frequently but probably more importantly, I tell people that my first love was actually God. 

I don’t say it often because it’s not wrapped up neatly. It’s all streams of thought and questions and excavation, always excavation. But this is where I live most of the time. When I move, this is what I’m moving through. Aren’t we all? 

But these sorts of movements—of the body and spirit—hurt us as often as they save us. Throwing yourself at the mercy of one thing may seem at first, a devout profession of adoration. But an outpouring of anything can be dangerous. There is always a reckoning when running full force into anything, even if it looks like open air and a soft landing. 

God and movement are both like this–difficult to pin down, easy to disappear into. They change shape all the time and I think that is probably the point. 

Snowboarding was a first love in the way that it unlocked a joy that I needed, deeply. It opened up doors into a whole new way of being in my body. It reframed the way I would seek out experience and alignment and ultimately, an identity situated around the idea of adventure. 

But it did not (could not) end there. Because even when you love a thing wholly, even when you know it intimately as your first and deepest joy—a repeated movement becomes stale eventually. Maybe even too cold. Maybe no longer quite worth the drive. 

I had to spread out, hold more nuance, and find new patterns. In my body, I tried climbing and surfing and skating—new ways of moving through the world while morphing the way in which I am part of it. A shifting, beating kind of something that traverses the material and the spiritual. So it was with God, who I can only begin to understand in full once I have dissected a multitude of parts and names. 

God must know this. I don’t think he’d be pleased with our imagination of him–at least the one that stuck. And if he’s angry at all it’s only for the damned fact that we keep missing the point. That we keep getting stuck on one face—one expression of a love that unfolds endlessly in every direction, in spectrums of color and sound outside a limited human understanding. 

So many ways to move. So many ways to morph and fill up containers. So many ways to break apart matter and history, to wipe it clean and start again with a new map. 

Like this; like learning to dance in a body that only ever knew how to look straight forward with hips squared. 

Because barreling downhill only gets you to the bottom of one thing. 

And like this; My mind, learning new language that reshapes each thought and every interaction with the rest of this creation. That reshapes movement—that reminds me with new words, how all of this is the same as spirit. 

God is so many things at once. So much more than we even can comprehend. 

So we can be. So we are.