The River
“Eventually,
all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was
cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement
of time. On some of the rocks are the timeless raindrops. Under the
rocks are words, and some of the words are theirs.”
Norman
MacLean (A River Runs Through It and Other Stories)
Rivers begin with a
little trickle of water coming out of the ground high up on the
mountainside. As the water rolls down, sometimes underground,
sometimes above, it washes away the soil and loose rocks, and
uncovers layers of hardened clay, packed sand and eventually finds
bedrock—in this area, that is usually sandstone, or “moss rock,”
as it's called around here. Slices of it are cut and folks create
patios with it. As the river continues, now over rock, it picks up
speed, and falls over banks forming waterfalls with deep pools
beneath them. For a while there is rushing, speeding, white-capping
water, flowing between and around banks of rocks and tree roots and
fallen debris collected along the way. As it widens and gathers
itself, however, it slows and becomes an old, meandering river,
sometimes deep and navigable, and sometimes shallow. It flows into
lakes and eventually into the great seas and oceans of this planet.
You can see why the River is considered by some to be the archetype
of archetypes—it mirrors life, or perhaps, life mirrors the river.
In life, a collection of
seemingly insignificant changes occur almost every day. People come
and go, you gain and lose, inform and educate, and experience a
multitude of small additions and subtractions. If you were to draw a
time-line of your life, noting all these events that occurred with
each year, you would see this flow, and how one change can altar the
course of a lifetime. Like a river encountering an enormous boulder,
we change directions, we alter our course to accommodate what blocks
our way. Rarely do we simply stop; we make adjustments and move on.
Some of life is a rivulet, some is white-water, and some is slow and
winding. Sometimes, we know where we are going, and sometimes we have
to trust that the river will take us there. We give ourselves over to the river, because, truly, we have little choice in the matter.
Learning to trust the
river is a very big deal. As long as we are alive, we are part of its
flow. We can choose to fight the current, or we can allow ourselves
to relax into it. When I was a child, we took blown-up inner tubes
from truck tires and rode them down the rivers near my home. It was
fun and felt natural to simply give yourself over to the flow of the
water. I wonder whether you have a memory like that. If you do, or if
you can at least imagine it, it's a good means of navigation when
life throws big rocks in your path. Imagine you are sitting in a fat,
rubber inner tube, floating down a meandering river on a beautiful
sunny day—with friends around, and a picnic waiting down stream.
Let life flow through, over and into you. And go with that flow. Life
is good, boulders and all. You can trust that the river knows the
way.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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