River Elegy

Water, part II

There has always been Water. And there has always been the Earth. If always the Earth, then always Gravity—force of change, Magician at large.

“Always” is a hard concept to grasp because those of us with a Western ideology see the world as we see ourselves: as linear as the Sun’s rays (though they, too, will bend ever so slightly to the whims of the Magician). We are born, we live, we die. From the beginning—there must be a beginning, right? —we have been taught that there are beginnings and endings. It’s a Promethean task for us to think cyclically, to bend the lines of our lives, let alone imagine their circling back on themselves like the mythical Ouroboros.

Nonplussed by philosophical conundrums, however, water has always obeyed circular laws, simple as they are. It forever flows to the sea. Then, in a vaporous sleight of hand, rises up, invisibly, silently, and hovers above us, ether-like. When the weight becomes unbearable, it falls to the Earth, first to the mountain tops, then to the hills, then to the valleys, and, at once, it is a river. And once a river, it never ceases in its deference to gravity, journeying down and down and down until it can journey down no more and must rise again to the heavens, ad infinitum.

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Just as it’s difficult to think in circles, it’s hard to imagine my life without a river. I’ve spent much of it by one, in one, thinking about one. Rivers have brought me boundless joy; some melancholy, and, miraculously, no sorrow.

But exactly why I’ve been pulled toward the river is murkier.

Perhaps it has something to do with the other restless souls calmed by the flow of moving water. Many of my most precious friendships, people I would walk on water for, hurl myself into current for, only revealed themselves by the banks of a river. And so then, did I. In that wild crucible true friendships are formed. These are friendships that flow through the years, with or without tending. We magically continue conversation and joy and feeling as if time were nothing more than an addendum to the thread of us. There is no awkwardness, no getting familiar again. Certainly, these kinds of friendships can crystallize in other ways, but a community by and of the river is what I know and love and will cherish until I perish.

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A water molecule is a tight little molecule, holds onto itself with gobs of electrostatic force. And yet at the same time, it is outwardly sticky too, in other words, grabs onto other little molecules. This is what holds water together, gives it its substance, and, ultimately, its soul. So, it’s possible this is what is appealing: its soul. Soul can only exist with seemingly contradictory elements: fierce independence and an affinity for the world nearby. And soul, well, without soul what else is there?

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I learned in grade school that no one snowflake is the same as another. I have no idea if that is true, but I can say with virtually no authority and total confidence that just like a snowflake, a river has never been the same and never will be the same. We, too, are never the same, not even for an instant. That fact is both distressing and exhilarating. While we sometimes fear change, dread aging (maybe because we tend to be linear thinkers), and otherwise feel safe in stasis, I’m convinced that dynamism is our natural state. And so, when I sit by a river staring fixedly at it, like some sort of idiot marionette controlled by bigger forces, I wonder if it is that vein of constant change—seemingly an oxymoron—that has a hold of me, draws me in, like the tiny forces holding a river together. Maybe those tiny forces are holding me together, too.

Community. Soul. Change. These talismans are to be found at the river’s edge.

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It’s true that in the end we go back to the Earth—our bodies, at least. Trained and ingrained as a skeptic, I’ve always stumbled over the details of religion. That notwithstanding, I can almost believe, want to believe, that though our bodies fall to the Earth one way or the other, our souls do not; they rise up, like so many vaporous rivers. And just maybe for a time those souls behold the view from on high before falling drop by drop by drop to the tongues of children, the dewy leaves of trees, and the veiny but still trickling rivers below. Soon enough though, the rivers will swell again, burst forth with life and purpose, and—inexorably, divinely—return to the open arms of the shining sea.