When looking to the river as a teacher, the term “go with the flow” is often evoked. The term suggests that one should flex with changes in direction. It’s a term that hints of passivity, suggests seeking ease, and warns against—to borrow another phrase—sticking oneself in the mud. I would offer that a deeper look at flow, in the context of the river, will yield both subtlety and nuance to our understanding of the concept.
Rivers, generally, are always making their way back to the sea. They do not, however, do so by following the shortest path. In a human-made world of straight lines, short cuts, and life hacks all designed to take less time, it’s worth considering why the world’s oldest highways take such circuitous routes.
Science tells us about how rivers start out straight and become curved over time. How the current will push at a weaker bank, wearing away, swirling in, gradually pushing a bank further out. The momentum of traveling around the newly curved bank propels the water toward the opposite bank, gradually wearing it away, creating another curve slightly downstream from the first, and so on, over and over, for centuries, till the river becomes a meandering series of deep bends and curves. The flow of the water creates the shape of the river.
You could say the shape of a river is simply science, but as I discussed in last month’s essay, even the disciplines of biology and physics are increasingly seeing the universe as an enlivened place that creates itself through interaction, rather than a mechanistic delivery of pre-programmed behavior. If an organizing principle of life is interaction, then the river, in creating curves, lengthens itself, expanding its opportunity to engage with land and creature. The river grows longer and runs slower as she ages. Water by nature, may always be seeking itself, but not at the expense of losing engagement with everything else. When we translate that behavior to human understanding, we can see the river-flow as curious, exploratory, and generous.
Water will follow the path of least resistance, but there’s nothing passive about a river. We take it for granted, but it’s actually remarkable how quickly and consistently water, by its very nature, is able to instantly find the least impeded path. The topography of life creates turbulence and resistance. We bumble our way forward over challenging terrain, but water is unhesitating. It is also relentless. The ancient river makes it look easy, but it took time and energy for it to create its wide bends or channel through stone to create a canyon. Going with the river-flow then, is not about seeking ease – it’s about finding a way around the obstacles while maintaining cohesiveness and integrity to oneself. It’s about looking ahead to where one wishes to go and finding the available path. River-flow is then also about persistence and acceptance, and the wisdom of the long game.
For our dark phase of the moon this month, our time to reflect and consider our course for the next month, some possible questions to ask ourselves:
- Where in my life am I pushing through to a swift resolution at the expense of interaction or joy?
- Where am I missing out on opportunities to make more, or deeper, connection? Where could “meandering” help with this?
- Where is fear keeping me from stepping into the current? Where am I damming my own river?
- Where can I accept obstacles and flow around them?
- Where can my resistance be the act of slowly wearing away at something?
I would also encourage us to take time to cultivate a more embodied understanding of the river. It can be awe-inspiring to consider that a river is a self-organizing being in pursuit of a goal (a return to home, itself, the sea), that on her way, by her very nature, increases her opportunity not only to relate to others but to generate ecosystems and sustain life as she goes.
For most of human history, most people have lived within a river’s watershed, their daily life integrated with the ecosystem made possible by the river. The fact that so many humans now see rivers as a resource to divert or dam for power, a place to dump waste, or an inconvenience to push underground, speaks to the level at which humans have disconnected from that which gives and sustains life. For river-flow to teach us anything deeper than a personal reflection to use in our isolated human-only spaces, we also must reintegrate into her embodied flow even as we seek to emulate her intellectually. We must reacquaint ourselves with the actual river near us, and remember it is she who comes to us through pipes and faucets.
- When can I make space daily to acknowledge/remember where my water comes from?
- What do I know about the health and wellbeing of the river where I live?
- How can I rekindle both awe for and connection with my local river/watershed?
- How can I use a physical connection to water and river help me feel more integrated with, or infused by, the land where I live?
More on rivers:
This essay doesn’t do the importance of rivers justice.
One of my favorite writers has just written a book about rivers. While I highly recommend the book, if you want something much shorter, there are some gems in this interview with the author Robert MacFarlane discussing the book, Is a River Alive? Listen or read here: https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/is-a-river-alive/
Emergence Magazine has also reprinted the prose poem, “The First Water is the Body” by Natalie Diaz https://emergencemagazine.org/poem/the-first-water-is-the-body/ – To read the poem in context, it’s helpful to know that the US has stolen the Colorado River from itself, the land and people – it is so dammed, canalled and diverted by irrigation that very little water reaches Mexico and the river itself rarely reaches the sea.