As lockdown took hold in Berlin, my partner and I began searching for alternative ways to travel. For eight months straight, we committed to a daily ritual: immersing our bodies in the icy waters of Berlin’s lakes, through the depths of winter and into the changing seasons.
What began as a simple act of endurance gradually became something else, a way of marking time, of staying grounded, and of reconnecting with our bodies in a moment of uncertainty and isolation.
I found that immersing my naked body into the cold water connected me, without any filter, to the living bloodstream of the Grunewald forest.
Each cell carries its own form of intelligence, and water activates it. Cold water ignites the vast network of our vascular system, a system that stretches, in total length, twice around the world, and suddenly it feels as though it enters into communication with the rhizomatic web of the forest, like an underground mycelial network.
This connection is necessarily brief. The cold imposes a limit, and because of that, the exchange becomes more intense, more immediate.
Each day, I encountered new presences: new plants, new flows, new entities. It felt like tuning into the subtle grid of the forest itself. The lake sits at its center, a mirror, a threshold, a portal.