Writing Exercise

Excerpt from Dillard's An American Childhood: 

"What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall.  You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall.  The hard water pelts your skull, bangs into bits on your shoulders and arms.  The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed.  Can you breathe here?  Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face?  Yes, you can breathe even here.  You could learn to live like this"(125).

Me:

"What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you lay in the leaves.  You tumble in the wind, directionless, banging and brushing by others as you try to make sense of being swept away.  Bumbling, you grab hold of another--or did they grasp you?  Or were you thrown together, now here, now there, rolling along together as fast as the fated winds blow you?  Time slows.  You stop.  Leaning up against a rock, you catch your breath long enough to notice how the sun glistens off of the spindly branches overhead.  Can you live here--can you breathe?  Can you dance on the bridge of a tree root, only to be lifted up, up, and onward?  Yes, you can do this.  You can, you must, live like this."

rough draft.