Deep
and Wide
“Oh,
Eeyore, you are wet! said Piglet, feeling him. Eeyore shook himself,
and asked somebody to explain to Piglet what happened when you had
been inside a river for quite a long time.”
A.A. Milne
(Winnie the Pooh)
Ah, back to the
river...my favorite metaphor. This piece is called, “River Music”
and if you look closely, you'll see lines of sheet music worked
through it. The fish are rainbow trout, or close enough to rainbows.
I've written extensively about rivers and their close comparison to
life's journey, so I won't do that here, except to say that
several other people have written eloquently and extensively about
rivers as metaphor. One quote that I particularly like is from Aiden
Chambers' book, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn.
After Cordelia has extensively described rivers, she asks a series of
questions I think are well worth considering:
“Do I
change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself
sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there's too much water,
too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will
the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and
become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine
me..so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me
into a canal to use for their own purposes? Or will I make sure I
flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley
of my own?”
Another comes from Brian
Andreas' book, Story People: Selected Stories and Drawings of
Brian Andreas. He writes:
“I like geography best...because your mountains and
rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”
Mountains and rivers do know the secret—they know where they are
going and what kind of music best suits the scene. Rivers change,
sometimes swamping the territory, and sometimes disappearing all
together, as do we. Hopefully, as we flow through our lives, we too
deepen and widen.
Speaking of deepening and
widening, I had dinner with my sons and daughter-in-law last night,
who are my extensions into the world of young folks. Last night they
talked about the way social media has affected our ability to think.
Extensive use of it not only limits the way that we express
ourselves—think Twitter here, and emojis as a substitute for
language—but it keeps conversation, and too often, our
thought-processes highly superficial. Because we are habitually
communicating at only the surface level, we find it difficult to go
deeper. The ability to think and speak deeply may need to be
explicitly taught, because it may, in part, be contributing to the
broad feelings of loneliness and lack of connection a growing number
of us, especially our youth and our elders, express. It could be
contributing to the increase in addiction and suicide rates. It's
something to think (deeply) about.
There's more to a river
than its surface, and there's more to us than we can express on Twitter. We have to do a little bit of diving to figure that out.
This is a good day to do just that.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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