River
of Life
“Anything
you grab hold of on the bank breaks with the river's pressure. When
you do things with your soul, the river moves through you. Freshness
and deep joy are signs of the current.”
Coleman
Barks
There's something special
about rivers, don't you think? Something ancient and primal. We know
that for as long as human beings have been upright, and maybe even
before, they have preferred camping along rivers—source of fresh
water, easy access for animals and for agriculture, and deeply soul
connected. Rivers rise and fall with the rain and snow melt, they dry
up and trickle, they make music with the rocks. They are alive. When
I was a child, there were no public pools in our town. We swam in the
river. I spent all day turning over rocks, discovering crawdads and
watching water striders walk across the surface. Rivers have a
mystical effect on me even today. They feel like home.
Coleman Barks lives on a
river near Chattanooga, TN, so it doesn't surprise me that he writes
poetry, and that the poet he's spent most of his professional
life translating and teaching about is the 13th century
Sufi mystic, Rumi. Barks writes, “I think we all have a core
that's ecstatic, that knows and that looks up in wonder. We know
there are marvelous moments of eternity that just happen. We know
them.” That's river talk! We experience that ecstatic connection at the
river's edge because we, ourselves, are a confluence of rivers—rivers
of blood, of energy, of emotion. Rivers of thought run through us,
rivers of fluid. Our gut curls in on itself, like the twists and
turns of a river. We flow, or become obstructed. We overflow our
banks, and dry to a trickle. No wonder a river feels like home.
April is poetry month.
Here's a little sample of Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, to
jump-start your reading:
Buoyancy
Love has
taken away all my practices
And filled
me with poetry
I tried to
keep quietly repeating,
No
strength but yours,
But I
couldn't.
I had to
clap and sing.
I used to
be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who
can stand in this strong wind
and
remember those things?
A mountain
keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That's how
I hold your voice.
I am scrap
wood thrown in your fire,
And
quickly reduced to smoke...”
There's more...so much
more! Enjoy your river of life today. Let the current take you.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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