A Meditation on Rivers

Your dream is a worry that nothing will keep

But time is a story and there will be more

--Joe Henry, Time is a Lion

I love that my daily run takes me across a river. 

I find that rivers are a reassuring reminder that change is the one constant we can rely on. 

Rivers are never the same. The water flowing past is in constant movement. Whether it is the slow waters of the Grays River, or the urgent snowmelt driven rapids of the Klickitat, there is unending movement to the sea. 

This first spoke to me paddling the waters of the Brandywine river in Pennsylvania. As my older brother and sister paddled, I was free to gaze over the side of the canoe, it’s rootbeer water toe-dipping cool in the humid summer air, its smooth stones always in clear view, reassuring to a nervous young boy discovering the joys of messing about in boats. Some of my earliest memories are of those canoe trips -- moving over water that was moving through space and time. 

A few years and 3000 miles later,  I used to watch the mighty The Dalles dam release great torrents of the shackled river as we crossed the salmon pink bridge. Or hold back the river to let the water level drop to expose the broad flat rocks spiked with dipnet platforms seemingly held together with nothing more than frayed rope and hundreds of years of native traditions. 

Crossing that bridge from Washington to Oregon, the dam on the left, the dipnetters on the right, representing changing permanence of the Big River.   The flat rocks of The Dalles and the drowned falls of Celilo area were the site of the largest Indian salmon fishery on the Columbia River prior to the construction of The Dalles Dam in the 1950s -- when the dam flooded Celilo village - it destroyed the oldest continuously occupied permanent settlement in North America.  The fishery and the village had existed for seasons without counting -- on a river that was alive with churning life -- before the falls were flooded and changed forever. 

Rivers are constants of change. 

We live our lives on a river of time, only sometimes realizing that the current reduces jagged wounds to smooth stones. 

People ask me if I am bothered by the accumulation of birthdays, the scars of the passage of time. It helps that I have done my best to appreciate the inevitability of the river’s flow, to watch its changes as they come. 

Salmon do this thing that has always fascinated me -- they are hatched in smooth stone shady creeks and are nourished by the microlife of that freshwater nursery. At a certain age, they take themselves out into the sea which  is much richer in experience and plentiful in nutritional forage. Later when they are fat on the bounty of the ocean, they swim back up the river, returning to the creek that gave them birth. Here they seed the next generation -- eggs buried among the smooth stones.

Then they die. 

The purpose of their death has become evident to scientists over the years of research. We have come to understand that the  nutrient rich dead salmon carcass becomes food for 137 species of plants and animals as it decomposes -- and those plants and animals create the food, fertility and shelter for the next generation buried amid the smooth river stones.

Salmon have evolved to collect the rich nutrition of the ocean, and transport it up river to fertilize the nursery for a generation of their offspring that they will never lived to see. 

Life is not a permanent condition, but it can create the environment of its own perpetuation if we do well in our time here. We can take the richness of our varied experience and create communities that raise heroes we will never meet. 

Sometimes the world can seem so short sighted. 

Those days, I like to look out on the river and realize that it is not the same as it was the day before, or even the second before I look at it. That it changes and in changing will never be the same.  

Now I realize that the water is being recycled too. 

Water molecules are very hard to destroy -- they may transform their states -- evaporate and fall as snow in mountain range, or rain on green green coast. Eventually, they make their way to the creek, to the river, to the sea and to the sky again. 

Rain to river to sea and again, ever the same, but each time different nonetheless. 

The water we see when we look out on a river is never the same as the day before -- yet perhaps that is a misapprehension -- a trick played on us by the short sight of our human eye

The water in the river is the same that has been traveling through our atmosphere for our lifetimes and the lifetimes everyone who has come before. So too, the atoms of our bodies spun out from the stars to form minds and hearts and souls that sail about for some fraction of a century thinking they are the center of the universe, only to be smashed to the dust in the end. 

A carcass on the river bed, rich lives feeding generations of change. 

We can try to stem the tide with formaldehyde, but our destruction and reconstitution is inevitable and on geology’s clock -- but a click of the second hand.

The river’s twin messages of change and permanence remind me that you can get through this, whatever this may be.

Rain falls where it will -- without regard to want or worry. It returns from the sea in the form of a storm with a gunmetal gray fist of thunder or an ever-present swirling mist. 

Nothing is permanent, the river is always moving, and yet always there. 

There is a Japanese sentiment Ichi-go, ichi-e -- it means treasuring the unrepeatable nature of the moment. Since each encounter or moment is singular and unrepeatable, it is our duty to give them our full attention. 

When I look out on a river, I am reminded of this. I know this river, it is the river that I cross every day, yet this river is new today, this river will not be here tomorrow. It waters will be replaced by other waters, its hidden stones turned and smoothed by time. 

I am not good at it -- this giving my full attention to an unrepeatedable moment -- but I aspire to be better, each day, as I cross the river. 

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