![\"\"](\"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/NatalieHopkins-1-350x468.jpg\")
Welcome to our August installment of READ LOCAL First\u2014the world\u2019s most extensive repository of Utah-related poets and writers. Today, we are proud to introduce creative nonfiction writer Natalie Hopkins.<\/p>\nWelcome to our August installment of READ LOCAL First\u2014the world\u2019s most extensive repository of Utah-related poets and writers. Today, we are proud to introduce creative nonfiction writer Natalie Hopkins.<\/p>\n
Originally from Florida, Hopkins now lives in Utah Valley. She fell in love with creative nonfiction while studying for her undergraduate degree.<\/p>\n
Last year, she won second place in the creative nonfiction essay category for \u201cWool Girl\u201d in the 2020 Utah Original Writing Competition.<\/p>\n
Hopkins works as an editor.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Welcome to our August installment of READ LOCAL First\u2014the world\u2019s most extensive repository of Utah-related poets and writers. Today, we are proud to introduce creative nonfiction writer Natalie Hopkins. Originally from Florida, Hopkins now lives in Utah Valley. She fell in love with creative nonfiction while studying for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1566,"featured_media":59355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,2513],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literary-arts","category-read-local-first"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/NatalieHopkins.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-06 21:32:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59354"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59360,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59354\/revisions\/59360"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Streamsong<\/strong><\/h2>\n
One morning in February, I go to the Jordan River to walk. It is a true winter morning: nipping cold and a constant, fluffy snow that coats everything in a downy gray. The river is iced over in patches but it is beginning to move again, and I am beginning to breathe.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am surprised it took me so long to come, as an entrance to the trail is just a small distance from my home. I have always wanted to have a walk of my own, a familiar path by which to mark my life. There is a carnal desire in me to walk forever, less a fondness for exercise and more a need to outrun all the dust I kick up inside myself. Truth be told, the Jordan River is less than picturesque, a slow-moving, dull-colored river that more than anything shows the lack of rain in Utah\u2019s desert valley. Where the trail bends around the point of the mountain, most of the surrounding greenery comes from a golf course that skirts the river\u2014a stark contrast to the landscape of dun-brown reeds and rushes, cracked earth, shrubby mountains. I want the river to be more than it is. I want myself to be more than I am.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The trail is hushed by the snow, and I see hardly anyone else. What idiot chooses to go walking in this weather? <\/em>I can\u2019t answer, but I watch the robins and other little brown birds that I don\u2019t recognize perching in the boney trees. By the time I return home, I am bathed in so much snow, my nose and cheeks dappled pink by the frozen water.<\/h4>\n
+<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Men wrote in scripture that Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan, another river in another desert, named for the way the water flows down into the Dead Sea. Jesus rose from it to hear the voice of God singing through a bird in a language He spoke. I wasn\u2019t baptized in a river. I was eight years old, arm broken and bound in a waterproof cast. After I was pushed down into the bathtub water, drowned in my second birth, I came up feeling unsure of how I was supposed to feel.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If birdsong is the voice of God, I hear it everywhere along my river\u2014an unintelligible revelation. I don\u2019t know which thoughts are God and which are me when all my thoughts make my chest burn with despair and hope and frustration and longing. I hear what I tell myself: that what seems narrow to us may be vast to God, that God carefully created infinite flowers and rivers, neurons and synapses to sing songs to us and teach our bodies to bear the trauma of living. I want to talk to that God and ask why I am meant to endure when everything in me begs to stop. I am always slithering away. When I quit dance lessons and volleyball teams and education programs, I would hide away in shame, covering my face with blankets like fig leaves. My mother, angry and tender at the same time, would eventually find me and pull me out again.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I read that in our earliest days, humans would hunt animals much larger and more powerful than themselves simply by outrunning and exhausting the animals. That humans would simply keep going <\/em>out of necessity, desire, spite.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jesus said they that endure to the end, the same shall be saved, <\/em>but that is what terrifies me. I am only twenty-five years old, and I am already tired of outrunning myself, tired of slogging through life in wet, heavy clothes. How does one follow the river that goes on endlessly? If I don\u2019t keep hunting the beast, will it eventually get me?<\/h4>\n
+<\/strong><\/h4>\n
It becomes a ritual, returning to the river every Saturday morning, winding myself through with the water, watching it change as the seasons begin to shift. The spring sun growing lighter and sooner\u2014the visual reminder of time\u2019s devotion to changing everything. The body of a river alive\u2014the melting snowbanks, the budding leaves, the ducks drifting and diving in the slushy water.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There is a quote that scuttles around the internet that says, You don\u2019t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body. <\/em>The quote is often misattributed to C.S Lewis and, indeed, isn\u2019t even quite a real quote but rather an amalgamation of various quotes of the same sentiment. I loved this quote for a long time. Yes! <\/em>I would think. I am not my body! <\/em>But what is my body if not my soul made manifest? The woman in me is so quick to deny that I have a body, especially in moments when it betrays me: the bloating of my fishbelly, the twitching of my eye,\u00a0the trembling of my child voice.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When I first realized I was experiencing panic attacks, I tried to control my body. I would run until I couldn\u2019t notice my breath racing, pick off all the skin of my lips until they bled, take expired Advil PM to pretend I could sleep at night. But I felt my heartbeat in every moment: standing in line at a grocery store buying canned goods for a pandemic, sitting in a desk chair typing endless words, lying on the couch watching news stories that gutted my chest. My heart was banging out a prayer my mouth couldn\u2019t utter. Oh God, I am afraid. <\/em>There is no room for God when anxiety is a whirlpool flowing ever downward. I was too alive, too aware of everything in my body.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I went to a doctor, who gave me a prescription and recommended therapy. I saw a therapist for a few months, wanting to benefit more from it, wishing I had more visible signs of mental illness, wondering if some part of me would always be unseen, a river rushing without witness.<\/h4>\n
I want to shed off stress and sickness like a snake, climb out of the pit of what-ifs <\/em>that writhe around me. When do I ever know a thought that isn\u2019t panic? I am a car humming in a closed garage, waiting for me to suffocate myself. I am a baby waking alone in the night, warbling for its mother. I wait with patience for the flowers to bloom, for the river to melt. I learn to mother myself, to examine my body and mind and say you\u2019re thirsty, drink this <\/em>or you\u2019re anxious, let\u2019s go for a walk, let\u2019s write, let\u2019s breathe.<\/em> I find flowers along the river path, crepe white petals with yellow centers like egg yolks. If I were a flower, <\/em>I think, I might be this one<\/em>. One I cannot name but that exists regardless.<\/h4>\n
+<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Isn\u2019t it funny how most humans seem to agree that nature is a woman? I remember reading about Gaia in a book of Greek myths, her hair a swirling green that fell across the swell of her earth body, bisected by rivers and pools of water. I wondered whether she could feel me walking on her ground, the first woman to flower and water and wither.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I think of the few earth women of my religion: Heavenly Mother, Eve\u2014two sides of societal femininity, too holy or too sinful, blamed or barely named. I think of how we hide these women behind veils of sacredness, as though we might ruin Her by speaking of Her. Does a bird ruin silence by singing into the air? Does a river ruin earth by running through it? I want to know the bird that Heavenly Mother created, the bird that Eve named, but I have no language for the landscape around me, within me, within Them. Can any exist in my mind if I don\u2019t? I cry Mother<\/em>, Mother <\/em>in my prayers, hoping She will answer, that when I am still, I will know that She is God.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Do I ever know? I remember being asked do you feel you lack because you are a woman? <\/em>and I said no. <\/em>I remember being told you are blessed because you are slow to anger, <\/em>and I said thank you<\/em>. But shouldn\u2019t I have been angry? Isn\u2019t anger the right of every woman who ever walked alone beside a frozen river? Where are the raging women, teaching me to continue down paths that are often unforgiving, whispering we are here, we are here?<\/em><\/h4>\n
+<\/strong><\/h4>\n
When I was twelve, I went to a camp for a weekend. The camp trip was just me and the other girls from my church in the backyard of my aunt and uncle\u2019s house. The land around their house was always a bit wild: overgrown grass, giant flowering bushes that I could later call bougainvilleas, oaks draped in Spanish moss that blanketed the ground in shadows. A sky full of unpolluted stars that seemed more than stars, and at the back, a little lake.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 On our last night, we sat around a campfire, watching the smoke and sparks disappear, feeling the too-near warmth but not wanting to move away into the darkness where mosquitoes lay in wait. Just a ring of women, young and old, sharing stories and lovely words of God and hope and faith that I wasn\u2019t sure I knew how to believe. I wanted to believe in God, but God was the flowers I couldn\u2019t name, the words written by other men, the water babbling songs I couldn\u2019t understand.<\/h4>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When my turn to speak came, I said the only words I could\u2014life is beautiful<\/em>\u2014and then I sobbed. I don\u2019t know why. I am naturally quick to cry, but some dam in my heart came undone and overflowed that night. Rivers rarely run dry. I always thought that I was made of earth, but now I think maybe I am made of water.<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"