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Have you ever traveled on a river? Not just jumped in one, though that is a delicious treat. I mean, actually submitted to the inexorable flow that carries you from one place to another over days. Maybe even weeks, or months. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing quite like it.
Rivers, like every natural thing, have seasons. Here in the northern hemisphere, the water runs high in spring as the snow melts and the frost in the ground starts to loosen and trickle up through the soil to start its long roll toward the sea. It can be a dangerous time to be on a river. I once saw an empty washing machine perched up above my head in the crook of a tree and a metal folding chair upended and dangling from a high branch dozens of feet further downstream, evidence of the height of the spring floods, which I imagined the owner of that washing machine also being caught in. Some country grandma caught unawares in her chair while she sat, smoking her Virginia Slims, and waiting for the spin cycle to end so she could hang things on the line. Then, in a rush, she was downstream somewhere else— maybe living, maybe not.
River people tend to be smarter than most about how to submit in a way that honors the nature of the beast, but sometimes the beast is hungry.
In summer, water levels drop and any boat you’re in may scrape the bottom. If things are shallow enough you’ll be carrying that boat a ways (assuming it’s the sort of boat that can be carried). The sun beats down, the heat bakes your skin, and the river makes you work, if not harder than other seasons, then differently. You have to put your legs into it. Take full responsibility for your need to move forward. Buoyancy eludes and gravity confronts, but only temporarily. A river isn’t a swimming pool. The shallow end isn’t an end.
The feeling of weightlessness when the boat slips past the shoals and back into the uplifting hand of the river is a relief both palpable and unparalleled, in my experience.
Once you’ve been on the river for days its flow infects your every cell. You lay down at night and it feels like you’re still moving with the current, even as you lay with all your weight pinned to the Earth. W.E.B. DuBois wrote about the double consciousness of Black folks in America. The bifurcation of self that is inevitable when, as a necessity of survival, you’re forced to look out through your own eyes while always, simultaneously, witnessing yourself through the eyes of others. Not being Black, I’ve never experienced that particular brand of duality. But I have experienced it as a woman, constantly riding the twin rails of subjectivity and objectification, trying to protect myself from crashing against the possibilities of violence and victimization.
No matter how well I balance myself, though, sometimes the beast is hungry.
The river offers its own iteration of a double consciousness, accessible to all. You’re always wherever you find yourself— in a particular place, at a particular time. The ground underneath you is true and the trees overhead. The sleeping bag that embraces you, and the slow breathing of your companions. But you are also simultaneously being carried forward by the inexorable flow of the river.
Lying on the shore at night you feel how both things are true at once. How you are endlessly here and not quite there, perpetually present and almost arriving to some unknown around the next bend.
You learn, also, that if you are unexpectedly tossed directly into the flow when the river is moving fast (and for safety’s sake, even when it isn’t) you have to put your feet downstream. That way, if the current carries you towards a rock, a tree limb, or some other unknown obstruction you’ll be able to catch yourself on it with your feet and push off, propelling yourself further downstream, rather than smacking up against something unyielding with the more vulnerable parts of your person first. Your head is the primary concern, but your heart can be devastating, too.
I have collided with the immovable heart first. I would not recommend it.
As a young person, I spent days, weeks, and probably months if you added it all together on rivers. I love to hike long distances— the activity itself and the lessons to be learned about self-sufficiency and submission— but river travel by canoe has always been my favorite. I don’t suspect I would have been able to name the experience as an embodied metaphor in those days. I just knew in my gut that the river and my interaction with it was a living, breathing model of something deep and important I needed to learn about life and death, how to participate and submit.
As I flowed along, in and on the river, I learned to be attentive to patterns, be humble and strategic. That there are limits, but also risks worth taking. What happened before, upstream in both time and place, I came to accept, always carries forward. There’s no outrunning anything and if you’re not careful you can be swept away and permanently hung out to dry.
At the same time, nearly everything inevitably makes its way to the sea. Everyone and everything you’ve ever known, even the most catastrophic spring floods, are eventually barely a drop in an infinite ocean.
I was spurred into meditating on the river this week listening to a conversation between Rob Brezsny and adrienne marie brown on brown’s podcast, How To Survive The End of the World. Rob is an astrologer amongst his many other job descriptors (Daddy Witch being my personal favorite), and has written the weekly horoscope column Free Will Astrology for decades.
I remember first reading his column in my early twenties, in the Seattle weekly free paper, The Stranger. There were times when Rob frustrated me in those days. He is a trickster and a poet by nature and at that point in my life I just wanted someone to tell me what to do. But over the years I’ve come to deeply appreciate not only the depth of his cultural knowledge and ways of connecting seemingly disparate things, but also his absolute faith in his readers’ ability to follow the breadcrumbs as they wind inexorably along the course of their own unique soul.
Rob’s, in other words, is not your standard weekly horoscope column, which offers exactly the sort of prescriptive advice I was looking for in my twenties. See also: any fundamentalist reading of any religious text or an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. Not that I was looking for either of those, but they are also the sorts of directives that offer their readers an illusion of control. They appeal to those seeking the comfort of final answers, not Mystery.
But Mystery is the river we’re traveling, my friends. We are simultaneously wherever we are in the present moment and rushing forward, a single drop in a crash and tumble of stories and events we’ll never fully understand. Prescriptive, literal interpretations of anything fly in the face of this reality. They are a raft made of toothpicks, too rigid and weak to carry anyone very far.
Rob refers to embracing the Mystery as “abiding in the paradox”. To do this we need the both/and of metaphor and myth, which allow us to read the patterns and keep ourselves in the flow of the current. To live in the double consciousness of the river of Mystery is to dwell in that paradox— fully present to the complexity of the immediate moment and always pulled towards the inscrutable sea.
For me, like Rob, the symbolic and mythic language of astrology is how I read and interpret the river. It helps me have some idea of the unique story I was put here to tell and how that story interacts with the wider story I’m swimming in. Other divinatory systems, like tarot and the I Ching, function similarly, as do religious texts when approached metaphorically. Because what is religious text, ultimately, but myth in written form?
Literature at its best, I think, also encourages a certain double consciousness. Reading well-crafted stories, you’re aware of the unique story of the characters and at the same time how the story mirrors or resonates with your own. I suspect this is one of the reasons some conservatives are so hostile to literature, pushing book bans and controlling curriculums. Not only because reading literature encourages the development of empathy, which obstructs docile acceptance of hierarchies of human value, but because it ignites the imagination. Imagination is the birthplace of metaphor, the idea that things can signify other things. That anything can, and often does, have multiple levels of meaning.
Once imagination has ushered you into metaphor then you’re awash in the Mystery. Get humble and put your feet downstream. You’re a river person now.
To practice integrity is also to be a river person, always keeping an eye on the swirl of interacting stories and staying humble about everything you don’t know. Doing your best to read the patterns, but understanding unknown obstructions are inevitable. Rob refers to the words of one of his Kabbala teachers, who says, “if you want to know the truth about anything you have to love it.”
We have to love the river, the risk and the journey of it. Otherwise, how will we ever ever even begin to understand this wild, winding life we’re living together?
I watched this documentary yesterday. I saw Lloyd perform the night before. I am a huge fan anyway, though there is still a lot to learn. He was born during a flood on the Mississippi in Memphis -- when the archival River footage came on screen, I started crying https://youtu.be/FGokzwaAp2g?si=Ve1E8OvEY4HcLrTr