She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad – she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes – the toad became beautiful.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Here’s the thing about mud that nobody, NOBODY, wants to admit out loud, because we’re all too busy pretending we’re evolved beings who’ve transcended our own filthy beautiful animal selves. Like that’s an accomplishment worth bragging about and not the single greatest tragedy of the modern condition. But mud is REAL. Mud is REAL in a way that nearly nothing else in this whole depleted simulation of a culture is anymore. I mean really REAL. Not Instagram-real, not LinkedIn-real, not whatever carefully filtered carefully lit carefully captioned reality-substitute we’re all dutifully manufacturing for each other like good little consumers of our own one and only lives… Smiling for the algorithm; optimizing our personal brands; dying by inches one push notification at a time; and calling it living. Sadly, nobody taught us the difference. But actual earth-and-water-combined-into-this-ancient-primordial-ooze-that-grabs-you-by-the-ankles-and-reminds-you-you’re-just-a-mammal-with-a-camera-and-a-pulse REAL. The kind of real that gets under your fingernails and STAYS there for a week afterward like a souvenir from the country of being alive.
Black and white photograph of Lindsey Dillon standing on a narrow trail in Kauai, Hawaii, surrounded by dense, waist-high tropical vegetation with large drooping leaves. She faces slightly to the right, wearing a light top, dark pants, and a backpack. Tall, slender native trees rise in the background against an overcast sky, while thick brush and vines close in on both sides of the path, emphasizing the remote, overgrown nature of the trail.
And Lindsey, she GETS it, she gets it, she GETS IT in a way rarely anybody on this entire sorry sleepwalking continent gets anything in years, in maybe a whole decade, in maybe my entire adult life. The way she just PLUNGES into the muck without flinching, without negotiating, without the 8 second pause most of us take to wonder: are our shoes are going to survive this. Like the whole entire point of having been given a body in the first place is to drag it hard through difficult terrain and come out the other side covered head to toe in irrefutable proof that you’ve actually existed. That you weren’t just scrolling or thinking about scrolling or composing the perfect ironic caption about scrolling for the imaginary audience inside your own head. The audience that does not exist and would not care if it did. The audience that doesn’t give a shit about you yet somehow still running your entire life.
The mud CLINGS, it clings to everything you’ve got, your shoes, your calves, your thighs, your sense of who the hell you thought you were before you started slogging through this beautiful horrible holy gorgeous mess of a river trail. She’s laughing, actually LAUGHING out loud, head thrown back, whole body in it, laughing the kind of laugh you can’t fake and can’t manufacture and can’t market. A laugh that comes from somewhere underneath language, like she remembers something the got systematically beaten out of me sometime around the third grade when they taught me in no uncertain terms that being clean was somehow more important than being ALIVE. That keeping your clothes nice was a virtue and not a slow polite death sentence administered one cautious careful tiptoeing step at a time over the course of an entire wasted lifetime. Today, she’s acting like she didn’t get the lesson. Either way, here she is, out in the muck with the toads and the rain and the silver, doing what Lewis was talking about, making everything beautiful by the radical insane unfashionable act of refusing, absolutely REFUSING, to stay clean.