What the Colorado River Is Trying to Tell Us  Matt Williams on Water, Blue Mind & Our  Relationship with Nature

 

Melanie (00:01)

Welcome to The Mindful Trainer Podcast. I’m your host, Melanie Webb, and I’m thrilled to welcome today’s guest, Matt Williams. Let me tell you a little bit more about Matt. Matt is passionate about wild places and what they can teach us about ourselves. After graduating with a degree in anthropology, he spent five years teaching high school at a Title I school and working in management consulting. When he wasn’t at a desk pushing buttons, he was outside running, skiing, biking, camping, and learning how to pay attention. Eventually, he realized that the recipe for a good life is quality time with people in beautiful places, doing things that fulfill you mentally and physically. So he finally made his 10-year-old self proud and traded the suit and tie for a sun shirt and sandals. In the years since, he’s fallen headfirst for the canyons of the Colorado Plateau.

 

Matt believes that guided, interpretive, backcountry recreation is a critical vehicle for social change. So, in addition to rowing boats, he’s currently pursuing a Master of Science in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. His research explores what it means to care for the Colorado River basin amidst coloniality, scarcity created by over-allocation, and climate change.

 

He also writes and shares pictures from his adventures on a blog called Pancake Morality. Matt, so good to meet you.

 

Matt (01:35)

Melanie, it’s awesome to meet you and it’s an honor to be here. Thanks for having me.

 

Melanie (01:38)

Yeah, this is gonna be such a fun conversation. We have some really meaty topics to explore, but before we dive in, I have a few rapid fire questions to get your mental juices flowing. Are you ready?

 

Matt (01:51)

All right, I’m nervous. Let’s do it.

 

Melanie (01:53)

All right, where was your last river trip?

 

Matt (01:57)

Ooh, okay, my last river trip was Gates of Lodore about a month ago.

 

Melanie (02:00)

Gates of Lodore one month ago.

 

Matt (02:03)

Yes, and Gates of Lodore is on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, for anyone that doesn’t know.

 

Melanie (02:07)

In Colorado and Utah? Or is it all Utah?

 

Matt (02:10)

It starts in Colorado and then you pass over the state line on the third day.

 

Melanie (02:15)

It’s one of my favorite sections of the Green River.

 

Matt (02:18)

It’s spectacular.

 

Melanie (02:19)

Great. All right, ready for your next one?

 

Matt (02:23)

Yes.

Colorado River

Melanie (02:23)

What excites you about working in the Colorado River Basin right now?

 

Matt (02:30)

Gosh. So many things. Everything. I remember meeting a man when I was in undergrad who had become a journalist and through journalism had gotten to meet some really cool people and hang out with a couple of presidents. And I asked him why he had chosen this path because it didn’t seem to make sense in the context of his life leading up to it. And he answered without missing a beat and said, I wanted a front row seat as history unfolded before me.

 

And that stuck with me. I wasn’t interested in journalism, but there was something about that where I was like, wow, what a cool way to approach your career and vocation. It’s just like I want to be in the room where these decisions are made. And I think as somebody who cares a lot about environmental issues and the way that people relate to nature, there’s nowhere better on earth right now to watch how this unfolds and to study the impacts of something like climate change on the way that we live and relate to the lands around us. 

 

So getting to be in the room so to speak, as a guide on the river and then getting to share that with people is an honor and a privilege.

 

Melanie (03:30)

That’s beautiful. And the perfect segue for my third rapid fire question for you. What about working in the Colorado River basin keeps you up at night?

 

Matt (03:43)

I think that the short answer is figuring out how to communicate what’s happening to the people that I get to take down the river in a way that actually catalyzes changed hearts and minds. And so often that’s through storytelling. And so I read a lot about the river and I spend a lot of time thinking about it, but trying to figure out how to translate that into stories and experiences that are actually gonna make a difference on the ground.

 

Melanie (04:06)

Beautiful.

 

Okay, so I have to ask one more rapid fire question. What’s your favorite book about the river system?

 

Matt (04:15)

Gosh. Well, I’m trying to write it right now. I’m

 

Melanie (04:16)

It’s really hard to pick, but I’d love to hear from you. You’re trying to write it? Okay.

 

Matt (04:22)

Trying to write it. Because the one book that if people could only read one book about the river doesn’t exist. And so I’m trying to write it. There’s some really phenomenal books about the river. I have had the privilege of getting to know a handful of the folks that are writing them, and so there are tons that I would recommend reading.

 

I think if there’s one book though that people should read to understand the way that we relate to the natural world and I think it applies on the Colorado River Basin, it’s a book called The Nutmeg’s Curse by an Indian novelist named Amitov Ghosh. and it’s a meaty one and and he covers a lot of ground, but it more than anything gave me the mental frameworks to make sense of what’s happening on the ground here with the river.

 

Melanie (05:00)

Thank you. Say that title one more time.

 

Matt (05:03)

The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitov Ghosh.

 

Melanie (05:06)

Okay, great. The Nutmeg’s Curse. Thank you. I haven’t heard about that one.

Matt (05:14)

Yeah, it’s fantastic.

 

Melanie (05:16)

That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about being on a river trip. Every river trip I’ve been on, the guides bring out a river box called the library. And they set it up and it’s full of books that might interest you about the river, books and maps and like I’ve discovered some really good books that way. And not only that, but I started my career as a wildlife biologist working with the native aquatic species in the Virgin River, which is a tributary of the Colorado River.

 

Matt (05:50)

Incredible.

 

Melanie (05:50)

And we would always be having a book club out on the river, you know, like what are you reading? What about this? Because it was always a very stimulating book club. Like I’ve never actually been able to be in a book club since then because

 

I like my genres and this is one of my favorite genres is reading about the Colorado River and its tributaries and everything. So we are gonna have such it it hits different when you are next to the river below these cliffs, under the stars, with you know, people who kindred spirits I’d say, who who are who want to experience and have who wanna be in the room.

 

Right when this is happening right now. Books are going to be kind of a theme here, I can see. And I can’t wait till you write that best book about the river, because then we’ll have a follow-up and tell everyone to go get your book. I’m gonna

 

Matt (06:47)

Me too.

 

Melanie (06:49)

That’s incredible and what a goal. Actually, I’m gonna make a reference to a book that I wrote about six years ago called Adventures in Mother Nature’s Gym. And in that I wanted to explore the connection.

 

Between fitness, which is part of my career, and the outdoors, which is the other part of my career. And I’ve always worked at these intersections where the two meet. In that book, I explore how nature improves our nervous system, our mental health, and our physical well-being. And in the book Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols, who was a marine biologist, he explored the calm, connected state that we experience around water.

 

But I’m curious about the other half of that equation. If rivers are healing us, what responsibility do we have to care for them in return?

 

What thoughts do you have about that?

 

Matt (07:46)

Yeah. Also I love everything you just said and I have so many thoughts about it. I think going back first to the the notion of water having this intrinsic effect on us and on our psychology and on our physiology, I have started to think in terms of humans as bodies of water and use that language specifically so that the notion of being in relation with another body of water like the Colorado River basin is a little easier to fathom as opposed to this boundary of like a human and a river. 

 

Because if you think about it, the majority of our body is water. We’re essentially just a giant sack of water moving through the universe. and so is the river. And so we’re just different bodies of water interacting with each other. 

 

And I think that that’s one of the ways I would explain, albeit in a a bit of of hippy-dippy language, the effect that rivers or bodies of water have on us when we spend time with them is there’s this cohesive force between molecules of water where they want to be together and they want to stick together. And when you spend time on or with or around a body of water, I think on a very molecular level, you can feel that pull, both of the river pulling you in, but also you pulling the river in.

 

I think that’s really where this notion of care begins and is rooted, it’s just in this innate and intrinsic attraction to water and this desire to care for water because we recognize and feel on a really deep level, in some ways that science can explain and in other ways that it can’t, the profound healing capacity of water and the energy in water, which is responsible for for shaping so many things. That’s something that makes the desert rivers on the Colorado Plateau really spectacular, they’re naked. There is so little vegetation to cover up what the water is doing that you can pull it up on Google Earth and I would challenge people to do this and and zoom in on the Gates of Lodore, for example, and look at these canyons that the river has been carving and all of its tributaries and and drainages and arroyos have been carving for the last couple million years and just see this beautiful calligraphy inscribed on the landscape. 

 

Being with water, I think we feel that energy and that potential. and then to your actual question about what it means to care for the river.

 

I don’t know that I have a good answer yet, but I think that’s a question, especially for those of us that live in the Colorado River Basin, that we should all be wrestling with a lot more because our well-being and our livelihood, including folks like myself that live on the Wasatch Front in Salt Lake City, is directly tied to the water that comes out of this watershed. 400 million acre or sorry, four hundred thousand acre feet of my water in Salt Lake City comes from the Colorado River basin. So as somebody that drinks water here on the Wasatch Front, I am quite literally dependent on this river basin. 

 

And then as a recreator and a guide that works on it, my entire livelihood is also tied to this river and tied to there being waters in it. And so I don’t think it’s a question of preservation or protection in and of itself, but a much deeper question of what does it actually mean to care for this river on its own terms and to try to figure out how we each show up and do that.

“Caring for the river is caring for ourselves.” – Matt Williams

Melanie (10:59)

Phenomenal response, thank you. There’s so much in there if we unpacked it all. So, which I won’t try to do, but I and I don’t think it’s so hippy dippy either to recognize that we are nature, that perhaps a molecule of water in my body at one time flowed through that Colorado River system. So when we care for it, we’re really truly only caring for ourselves.

 

Which sounds selfish, right? But if we can’t be altruistic enough to care for it because it has value on its own, looking at it through the lens of like, I’m only caring for myself and preserving my own life by caring about this place that I might not even ever go see. And I think that’s the hard part, is that some of us who’ve been in these spectacular places have a pr we’ve built these personal relationships to these places that we then carry back with us into our lives.

 

I wonder if you have any thoughts for the person who hasn’t experienced it. I like your suggestion to perhaps use Google Maps. It’s always fascinating to see that high level view from space of Earth.

 

Matt (12:14)

Yeah. No, I think that’s so well said. 

 

I love the work that you’re doing and I think it fits in this conversation so well because there really isn’t a distinction between caring for this place and caring for ourselves. I think that’s one of the most critical things for us to try to recognize to solve a lot of the problems we’re currently wrestling with is like these two things are one and of the same because the the boundaries that we divide between myself and the river are are really just a fiction that we’ve created because it serves certain things at the expense of others.

 

I had a moment a couple of years ago where I was out running in the Wasatch, kind of up above where I live here, and it occurred to me I’d spent all this time thinking about self-love and and reading Buddhist texts and self help books and trying to to really wrap my mind around what it means to love yourself. And almost like a mystical experience or an epiphany, I was running through an aspen grove, and aspens had this recurring significance for me for whatever reason.

 

The thought occurred to me that to care for myself is also to care for these aspens, because there’s no difference between myself and these aspens. If I take care of them, they’ll take care of me. Like that’s why I’m up here was to get out of the city and into these trees and feel that effect that you’re talking about on my nervous system and feel the way that that calms me and the way that brings me back down to earth. So the trees really aren’t different from myself. And if they’re helping me in that way, like I have an obligation to help them in that way.

 

This really abstract, hard to comprehend idea of loving oneself became really concrete, where it’s like if I can just love the lands around me that sustain me, I am loving myself. And then it creates this positive feedback loop. And so I think to your question, there are ways to explore the Colorado River basin through books, through Google Maps, through coming on a guided trip like the ones that I have the privilege of getting to lead.

 

But much more important for folks I think is getting to know their own backyard and getting to know the watershed that sustains them, whatever that might be, or the watershed that has sustained their family and and really just trying to facilitate that connection with the land that they call home and that they’ve committed to taking care of, which might be the Colorado River Basin or it might not be.

 

Melanie (14:24)

Love is the frequency that shines its light through everything that you said, right? It’s not and not hippy dippy, right? One of the things I love about working in the fitness and well-being space right now is the proliferation of evidence that we’re finding our connection to nature. And when I started, you know, guiding trips years ago, I think the first trip I ever guided commercially was like two thousand seven.

 

And that research didn’t exist. I just knew that when I took my clients out of the gym in Washington, DC, and I brought them to my stomping grounds here in Utah, I saw them change before my eyes. And I was like, what’s happening? These are totally different people. 

 

You know, it’s not that hard to understand that when people go on vacation, a lot of stress melts away. But there’s also something about the natural environment that really holds us and I think allows our guard to come down a little bit so that we can have those experiences with the aspen trees, with the water bodies. 

 

I wonder what it’s like for you as a guide on the river to experience that on a regular basis. How do you see that happening to your guests?

Indigenous Knowledge and the Colorado River

Matt (15:41)

Hmm, such a good question. And I wish I had a concrete and concise and coherent answer. And I’m not sure that I do. But some thoughts that I will attempt to share…

 

I think that the first thing is to your point, there is this self-evident nature to a lot of these things where science is catching up and finally starting to recognize these claims that indigenous scholars and indigenous people alike have been making for millennia. Western science is finally figuring out these things and indigenous folks and Eastern scientists and other folks amongst them are saying, Yeah, we’ve been telling you this forever. Like maybe we couldn’t or didn’t feel the need to prove it through a peer-reviewed study. But like if you spend time in this place, you can tell that this is going on. It’s self-evident. 

 

I think that what makes guiding really special and what makes it a privilege, especially for someone like me that that doesn’t have ancestral ties to the land that I now call home, is that I get to spend every day, not just in this place, but like quite literally out on this place, outside, subject to the elements, dealing with rain when it comes, dealing with snow, dealing with wind, dealing with the heat and the the dryness and all these things.

And as a result of all that, it leads to this very embodied knowledge and this learning that part of this grad school experience for me has been trying to figure out is there a way to fit that into academia and into Western knowledge production? And I change my mind frequently, but at this point in time, like I don’t know if there is. I don’t know if that’s the vehicle to communicate about this stuff. I think it is through experience and it is through guiding and it is through probably creative nonfiction more than anything.

 

But the way I see my role and my obligation as a guide is to spend this time paying attention to the lands that I get to take people down and the rivers that I get to take people on and to deepen my own understanding, my own relationship with that place, to notice things that maybe would have taken them years to to figure out and to discover, to read about that, to to study the science about that, to learn from the indigenous elders about that, to understand what these things mean.

 

That I can then translate that experience for them. I’ve started thinking about it more than anything as meditation, where in the same way that you might go to a gym and have a trainer in a gym kind of tell you, this muscle’s hurting, that means that your form is a little off and you’re lifting in the wrong way. I bring a guest down the gates of the door and they start to tell me on day three that they’re experiencing this mental sensation of peace and this anxiety seems to have left them.

 

I spent four years thinking about why and reading about why and talking to the river about why and and I can hopefully augment their curiosity about that and their realization that this is happening with some more meaning and some more understanding and give them some more tools to work through that. 

 

I think the other piece is giving them a way to take that off the river and translate it into their home environment, whatever that might be, because I’m incredibly lucky to get to spend the majority of the summer out on the river in these places. And very few people will get to do that. But I see this transformation happen on a river trip. 

“We’re not separate from the river—we’re simply another body of water.” – Matt Williams

Part of our job as river guides is giving people the tools to take that four day experience, whatever it might be, almost like a cleanse and the shock to the system. And then figure out how I can take it home to my life and make some changes to how I spend my time to continue not only reaping these benefits, but to your point, caring for these places around me that care for me and care for all of us.

The Role of an Outdoor Guide

Melanie (19:25)

That integration piece and having a witness to help you through that. I think that’s I think you just landed on I wanna suss that out, is a really key point and experience of how can I have to edit my words here, you guys, as I think this through, but the human relationship with each other, someone witnessing what we’re experiencing and helping us understand. I don’t think in this landscape of moving toward automated tools, I don’t know that we’re gonna be able to ever replace that wisdom that is shared between two human beings of an experience that happens out there in that place.

 

Matt (20:14)

I love that.

 

Melanie (20:16)

So I just want to let that sink in about the importance of your job as an interpretive guide who’s not only out there shepherding people safely through what could be a dangerous experience. You’re responsible for their lives for days on end. But then there’s this deeply human experience of interpreting their experience coming into your realm.

 

Matt (20:53)

Yeah. Can I riff on that for a second? Because I love what you just said.

 

Melanie (20:56)

Please do. Please take that and run.

 

Matt (21:00)

So when I was becoming a guide, I knew nothing about anything. I could not have been further over my head than I was. And it was through a lot of luck and kindness and generosity of many people that I managed to make it to where I’m at today.

 

There was one guy in particular named Nick who was one of the trainers as I was starting my career and who has remained a mentor and a good friend and I look up to him a lot and he’s still rowing boats at the the company that I work for, who was teaching me how to make home style fries on one of our training trips. I was boiling these potatoes that I had sliced in a very particular way that he told me to slice. I asked him, Nick, how do I know when they’re ready to pull out and throw on the griddle? And he goes, I don’t know.

 

And he walks over and he pulls one of the potatoes out and pinches it in between his fingers and then throws it back into the pot and walks away. and I didn’t realize he was watching, but I then walked up, dug out one of the potatoes, pinched it in between my fingers, put it back in the pot and then walked away as well. And fast forward about a week later to when I’m finding out that I got the job and I made it through training, Nick brings up this this moment and says, I can tell that Matt’s gonna be a great river guide because of this thing that happened and then he recounted this story in front of the the rest of our our management team. That really stuck with me. 

 

I don’t know that I fully understood why until listening to you say that and thinking about this concept of validation and how important validation is. I think that because of the role of social media in our lives nowadays, validation has almost taken on this negative context where it’s like, you need your experiences validated through likes or through reposts or whatever it might be. I’m not on social media, so I don’t know what the language is nowadays. But that kind of validation I do think is potentially toxic. 

 

But there’s also this validation to your point of just like human-to-human experience for things that you haven’t done before, where it’s like, hey, I just did this thing and I’m not sure if I’m doing it the right way. I need somebody that has done it before and that has experience with this to tell me like, am I on the right path here? 

 

Looking back now, I realize that’s what Nick was doing. Like he could have sat down and explained how to make the potatoes and it only would have gotten me so far. But it was through doing the experience and then having him validate that direct experience and be like, Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to look, that’s how it’s supposed to feel, that’s how it’s supposed to taste, that I was able to absorb that knowledge. 

In that way, what’s happening out on the river when we share these experiences with guests is I’ve gotten to not only go through this myself through all these river trips, but watch hundreds of guests go through a similar experience. 

 

Somebody might be having a moment unlike anything they’ve ever had where they feel more calm and they feel their nervous system relax in a way that it hasn’t in a decade or maybe ever in their life. And I think they’re looking out to us for validation, like, is this real? Did I do this? Did you do this? Did the river do this? 

 

That’s like talking about caring for the river, it’s like we all did it. I mean the river is the primary mover here, but like you were open to the experience and maybe we played some really small role in getting you here safely and keeping you comfortable. And validation is such a beautiful way to think about doing that. 

 

I appreciate you bringing that up because I had never thought about it before.

Embodied Wisdom

Melanie (24:10)

Yeah, that’s why these conversations are so fun. Like the learnings that we can have by sitting down and talking about our human experience. I and you said another word, embodied. I’ve actually been playing with that word a lot in terms of how I think about how I come into the world and share what I do. And so when you get there, when you know how to express that embodied wisdom, again, I’ll be looking for your words of wisdom because it’s really difficult. It’s very challenging to communicate experiential things without the other human right there to validate. 

 

Now I am on social media, you know, and I do play in these realms. I enjoy technology actually and and and I enjoy taking the sensuality of the human experience, especially in connection to nature and trying to communicate that through technology. To me, that’s kind of the crux point. It’s the work that I do, which I have a really good time exploring. So thanks for me. I really appreciate all of the thoughts that you’re bringing to the conversation. 

 

This is the perfect segue into my next talking point, which is that water, you know, water is more than a resource, which is how we’ve all been taught to look at it here in the West. You live on the Wasatch front on the Salt Lake City side of Utah. I’m on the Wasatch back in the Park City side of Utah. and to anyone listening, we have some serious water issues going on out here right now. but going back to the concept of blue mind and this this relational experience to water,

 

You know, again, the water, what the water does to the human brain, and this is how it affects the nervous system, lowers the stress hormones, improves mood, you get some greater creativity, dopamine. so your work is asking the opposite question. What kind of relationship should humans have with water? And I love thinking about those as, you know, two sides of the same coin. 

 

You described yourself as like, talking to the river, or that the Colorado River speaks back to us. I had an experience like that when I was on the Virgin River once, where the river spoke to me. And it was so audible that I was like, wait, what? Did you just talk back to me? It was so cool. But I wonder, what do you think the river is trying to tell us?

Water Conservation

Matt (27:06)

Such a big question. It’s incredible that you had that experience. And I wish we had more time to dig into that. And maybe we do, and I would love to hear more about it if it’s something that you’re open to talking about, because those experiences are incredible.

 

I think that collectively, and I’ll start by saying something that I struggle with and I’m still wrestling with how to nail down here is the scale at which we should be thinking about bodies of water:

 

Like is my job to think about the Colorado River basin as a whole because that’s the watershed? Is it to think about this one section of river that I spend the most time with? 

Is it to think about like the literal creek that flows past my house? 

Is it to think about all the above?

Because I do feel like there’s just so much information in the world nowadays that one of the biggest challenges we’re all facing is where to draw the line and how to set the filter.

 

I will answer the question, but I’m not sure that even thinking necessarily at the level of the watershed is the right answer for all of us at least, maybe for some of us. But to answer at that level, I think that what the river is trying to tell us is a that we need to slow down, two, that we need to pay attention, and three, that we need to think about bringing our habits and our ways of living and moving through the world into alignment with the specific time and place that we find ourselves in. 

 

I’ve learned so much from reading Indigenous scholars and Indigenous peoples writing about these sorts of things because an idea that they use very frequently is this concept of place and time bound knowledge and knowledge that is produced specifically for this watershed, this side canyon at this point in the year.

 

And this recognition on the flip side to abstract things to the level that they don’t fit in any one place or time can be really useful because we can build these massive engineering systems across the the Colorado River basin and send water out of the basin to all these big cities, but it’s also really dangerous because now we’ve overallocated the river and we are over consuming the river to the point that we need to cut our our consumption by probably at least a quarter and potentially up to forty percent over the rest of my lifetime, which is an insane amount of water for 40 million people to stop using. 

 

I think that we can avoid a lot of these problems by thinking more locally, by thinking relative to what’s happening in this moment in this specific place. Now that’s easy to say and really hard to do because we’ve built this whole world around these abstract ideas. And so I’m not presenting that as a real solution to the problem. 

 

But I think in addition to solving this abstract crisis that we now have on our hands, it should be a both and calling where we’re also wrestling with, to your point, what is the river calling us to do? 

“The river isn’t just asking us to conserve water. It’s asking us to rethink our relationship with it.” – Matt Williams

Well, maybe it’s calling us to ask bigger questions than we’re asking and to think about deeper solutions than we’re thinking about. And it’s not just how can we cut water consumption in order to avoid crisis, but then also how can we rethink the way that we develop, the way that we produce food, the way that we recreate, the way that we take care of each other and and protect wild lands and who should be stewarding them and how because we don’t have a choice. The river is kind of forcing our hand and at the same time I think suggesting a lot of answers to these questions.

 

Melanie (30:34)

Spoken like one who truly has a relationship to water as an entity and a being rather than rather than a resource to extract from. 

 

Matt (30:41)

That’s a very kind thing to say.

 

Melanie (30:34)

You expressed profound thoughts there, thank you. You studied anthropology. I can hear that as you speak about indigenous peoples and native peoples, and which is part of the question of who should be shepherding this water or stewarding this water, who should have a say in what happens to it. 

 

Maybe you can talk a little bit more about how they might experience it in a time and a place.

I think of that also, the Buddhist principle of accepting reality as it is at this moment. This presencing and being present with, rather than a timestamp in 1960, something that said, We have this much water, so here’s how we’re gonna divvy it up. Now we know that in fact we’re looking at a different situation than we were in the 1960’s water wise. I don’t know, speak more to your anthropological studies and how that influences your perhaps willingness to to learn from these other voices.

 

Matt (32:17)

That’s a really big question and a really important question. I don’t think there’s a right answer. I think there are many answers and many good ones, many probably less so. I think that the the most helpful thing I could probably share from my specific context as a guide is when I take people to cultural sites on the river when we’re we’re going down on a trip and we stop somewhere to go look at a pictograph panel or a petroglyph panel and talk about what it means. 

 

One of the main things that I’ve tried to shift personally and and push for shifts in across the the guiding industry, if it’s okay to call it that, as small as it is on the Colorado River basin, is a a recognition that we’re not going to these sites like a gallery and a museum for this this previous era of of human history or going to these places which are effectively libraries is kind of how I’ve come to see them. 

 

For people that continue to live in this part of the world and steward this part of the world and who recognize the ties that they have to land and the way that land cares for them and are very vocal about that. But in many instances and places and ways are silenced and their history is erased and they’re dispossessed of their land. And it’s through extreme privilege that I have the opportunity to be the one getting to introduce folks to these places. And that’s a whole nother conversation that we could have.

 

I think at the the very least in the situation that I now find myself in, what I can try to do is is suggest to the folks that come on these trips with me that that we’re the next era or at least this current era of folks getting to move down through these canyons and learn from this place. What these panels are a testament to is the relationship between people and this place. It’s a relationship that Indigenous people continue to have and that we now have and are joining into. 

 

The panels are not meant to be read as these abstract texts that you can take and read on the beach in Malibu or in a high rise in New York City. They’re put into the rock on purpose because they’re meant to be read here. 

 

You can’t read them likewise without knowing the place that they’re in. And so that’s not to say that there aren’t motifs and symbols that might reappear across the canyons of the Colorado Plateau, but there are specific panels that I’ve gone to visit at different times of day and at different times of the year. Every time I go, I find something new and I find something different. 

 

It really leads me to think and wonder if the key to understanding and unlocking the meaning in these panels is not reading more texts or or digging into the archaeological archives, it’s just spending a bunch of time in that place. 

 

And rather than doing a PhD in in some field of study at the University of Utah, maybe I just need to go spend five years living in Jones whole drainage and in Dinosaur National Monument, staring at this wall and and watching what the animals do and watching what the plants do and and how the water behaves. As I do that I’ll come back to the panel with this other layer of meaning and I’ll start to unlock what it’s saying and what it’s trying to tell me to do. 

 

The last thing I’ll say with that is I think that amongst many things, one of the things that that these panels of petroglyphs and pictographs do brilliantly and beautifully is that they have encoded meaning and information that has lasted for thousands of years in a place and that information is relative to that place. 

 

I often try to remind people that if human or if Western civilization collapsed, and if human life as we knew it ended tomorrow, the power plants shut down and like we lost water and air conditioning went out, like all of our data centers would crash, we’d lose all that data eventually. The libraries, all the books would get wet and through humidity probably most of the books would be lost, and so much of the knowledge that we produce would wither in probably a decade. I don’t know, I’m sure someone has thought more about this, but it’s not gonna last that long, digital and paper knowledge. 

 

Yet if you had to move back into one of these canyons and try to make a life for yourself there, there is this remarkably detailed record on the wall of exactly how you do that and and of all these different layers of meaning around that, which will continue to persist for many, many years. and so it’s just a remarkably powerful reminder of that concept of knowledge being tied to place and time. 

 

As a non indigenous guide, I think my responsibility in sharing those places is trying to approach it with humility and reverence and anchor it in a reminder of the continuing indigenous legacies in this country and the way that indigenous people should be involved in these conversations and often aren’t. And then also to challenge people to think differently about how we move through the world and what we can learn from some of these indigenous ideas.

 

Melanie (37:27)

I like that a lot and I want to take that roadmap you just laid out for us and ask you I’m going to put you on the spot here, as we prepare to wind up this conversation, which is going to be really hard for me to do ’cause I could talk to you about the river for hours. Maybe what’s a roadmap we can take as we leave this conversation.

 

How can we take these principles we just talked about and apply it now to us?

 

Matt (37:59)

Hmm. So have you seen the movie My Octopus Teacher? Okay. It’s one of my…

 

Melanie (38:05)

No, I have not. Okay.

 

Matt (38:07)

…favorite movies to recommend. I would recommend it to everybody. Craig Foster is the the guy behind it and he’s also written some really cool things and has a remarkable career, kind of a Steve Irwin type guy who is non-Indigenous in in South Africa but has dedicated his entire life to being in the

 

The outdoors and forming relationships with other species and cultivating this quality of intuition. And in the movie, what he commits to doing is spending 10 years going down into the little cove on the ocean beneath his house in South Africa and snorkeling without a wetsuit and hanging out with the creatures that live there. For 10 years, every single day, rain or shine, sick or well, he’s gonna go out and do this. And halfway through doing this, he starts to form this friendship with an octopus.

 

That lives there and and starts to notice that it seems like the octopus has formed a relationship with him, which kind of goes back to the notion of the river caring for us and us caring for the river. And that leads him to produce this documentary, which I think is spectacular in many ways. But what it really led me to start thinking about for the first time, and I think downstream, that’s one of the reasons why I became a guide, is that the the roadmap for us, the most important thing we can do is just find that place that we have a deep emotional tie to.

 

And commit to spending time with it and paying attention to it. And there are more sensational and dramatic ways that we can care for land. We can go to rallies, we can sign petitions, we can call our congresspeople, we can donate to organizations that fight for land. and All those things are really important as well. But the most important thing that I think we need to do is just go spend time in that place. And again, it doesn’t need to be like this remarkable national park or this incredible river canyon. 

 

Like there’s a little peak just behind my house here called Jack’s Peak. And I try to walk up there every day. And when I walk up there, I talk to the peak and I ask how it’s doing. And I’m trying to form this relationship with it and think about as crazy as it sounds, like what does the peak need? What is it asking for from me and how do I go about doing that? 

 

I know that that might sound crazy to a lot of people, but I think that that’s at least at this point in time, how I see the roadmap is like we need to pick these places that we’ve committed to and really commit to them and form that relationship with them through pay and attention. And that doesn’t always mean that it will happen out there. 

 

I think to bring it full circle to what you said earlier. Like a lot of times, pay and attention I think leads us into our own hearts and minds and bodies. And that’s where those signals are received. And so it requires this this quality of noticing what’s out there, but also this ability to like sit with the emotions and

 

sensations and feelings that that brings up inside of us.

 

Melanie (40:50)

Gorgeous thoughts. Yeah. Can I share the time that I did that?

 

Matt (40:55)

Please.

 

Melanie (40:56)

During the COVID shutdown, I was actually recovering from post-concussive syndrome. Had had a couple of concussions within a short period of time, and I was physically and mentally not well. And I was receiving phenomenal treatment, but because of the COVID shutdown, I wasn’t one of those people, and even after the shutdown was lifted, I wasn’t one of those people that was road tripping all over the West to my favorite national parks. Like I said, I’m gonna root down really deeply right here. And every single night at sunset, I will either be on my paddle board on the lake, or I will be up on the mountain looking at the sunset over the lake.

 

And I did that every single night for months. And fortunately, this was in the summer too, which was great. But when you do that, you start to notice the sun setting a little later tonight. You know, we think it’s easy to detect the differences in the colors and things like that. But that was such a profound connection between me and the sky and place.

 

And again, putting roots down, and I’d been a traveler and a guide for many years. That was a new experience for me to say, no, I’m gonna stay right in this place and see what can happen when I do that. And then and one of the things that happened one day is I walked out into the backyard, which was near the forest, so I had a lot of trees there, and I stumbled upon a mass of feathers that were on the ground. And it was evident that I liked that I started following the feathers.

 

And one led me to the next, to the next, until I found like essentially there was some poor bird that met its end by getting picked off by another bird, right? And I had found a plucking tree. And I was really in the depths of depression and anxiety as a result of these head injuries that I’d had. 

 

I went to my therapist at some point a week or two and we talked about following the feathers. And that became what is still like a metaphor for me in my life of following the roadmap and presencing and being present enough to notice just those little things. And it was a really tender experience for me that even just talking through my feelings with the therapist of like, I don’t know where my life is going. I’m totally stalled out and sitting on the bench right now in this healing process, you know? but but I like the idea of talisman like

 

Ha and to me the feather became a talisman. It became like, it’s okay that I don’t know. I’m here right now and I just had this discovery and maybe I can just sit with this right now and that maybe that’s enough. I don’t know, in our Western culture where we’re supposed to be doing and blah, you know, like and if you remember at that time the restrictions came off and everybody just exploded outward.

 

And here I was for the first time in my life rooting down intentionally so deeply. It was it was anyway, just a very meaningful relationship to time and place for me.

 

Matt (44:17)

Yeah, that’s such a beautiful example of what I was trying to say and you said it so much better. 

I admire you immensely for approaching things in that way. I’m gonna be thinking about that for many years to come.

 

Melanie (44:29)

And you know, I I didn’t have much of a choice, but but it it worked at that time and my love of nature just it inc it blossomed and that healing reciprocity really took on a whole different meaning when I was not well versus when I was well and recreating on the land and water. Someday I’ll know how to put that to words as well. But in the meantime, hope just having these conversations helps me share that embodied wisdom that I was able to experience and

 

Maybe I love the invitation that you shared with our listeners and maybe mine will just be like what are the ways that we can have these experiences that cause us to have embodied experiences in time and place and and and I would challenge everyone like can you create that? And if so, where would you choose to do that? And come back and share with us because we’re gonna wanna know.

 

Matt (45:25)

I want to know.

 

Melanie (45:26)

Thank you.

 

Matt (45:26)

It’s a great question and a great challenge.

 

Melanie (45:29)

Matt, this has been awesome talking to you. I know you have a blog. Share that with the readers so they can connect with you more and keep learning from you.

 

Matt (45:40)

I write on Substack under Pancake Morality. This has been such a pleasure and I could also sit here and talk all day. So Melanie, thanks for making this podcast and doing the work that you’re doing and moving through the world and the ways that you move through it.

 

Melanie (45:58)

Thank you too, Matt. I hope I will see you on the river. And if not, maybe we can grab a cup of coffee and meet where the Wasatch Mountains converge for us. Thank you.

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