The River

Hello again, dear friends and fellow ponderers. As I find presence here with you again, I am reminded that there is a time for everything. A time to speak and a time to be silent. A time to tear down and a time to build. A time to plant and a time to uproot. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time for everything and everyone, every place and every encounter; all is made beautiful in its time.

Well, here I am, returning from my time of silence and season of undoing to share something "new" with you. See, life is a funny thing, if you let it be. It's within our power to choose the measure by which we measure our lives and others. One can choose to measure their life by the moments of sorrow, failure, dismissal, abandonment, or rejection, or one can choose to measure each moment according to what it presents, without keeping score, holding on to slights, or harboring unspoken resentment.

How can you see things for how and what they are if you only ever look through the lens of your sorrows, failures, dismissals, abandonment, or rejections? Every new experience is now tainted by what's in the eye of the perceiver; the new is measured by the old and never truly allowed to be new. In measuring what is or could be against what was, we deny the present our presence, and now all that can be had is what was.

Yet further, we fool ourselves into thinking we have control over something greater than ourselves - life.

The river of life flows on its own accord. It cares not what or who its path encounters as it meanders through forests and canyons, rolling down from deep in the mountains and hills, all the way over and around obstacles and hindrances to its path. And the river only has one path - to collect itself once more amongst the assembly of ocean waves.

Much like the river, we have a similar trajectory to all our paths, the assimilation of what was to what is and the death of it all to begin again. Matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely transformed, and our entire life is a reflection of that transformation. To fear death is to fear life itself, and to live in fear is a frivolous task leading to much disappointment and dismay.

This is by no means a condemnation of the fragile human psyche, which left to its own devices, forces you in the direction of self-preservation and protection. It's only natural after all, to have recognition of life and do all one can to preserve and protect this precious existence. Though, just as it's natural for the river to run down from the snowmelt of the mountain tops, it's not any less natural for that river, in its flow, to fight gravity and accumulated debris so that it may reach its final resting place.

How much does this river benefit others too, in all its winding and weaving through cracks, caverns, rocks and trees? How many fish and plants benefit from the oxygen bubbling between its shores from the flow over precarious objects along its path? And what of the minerals brought out and deposited through its upheaval of the earth around it, as it carves and chips away at that seen as solid and unmovable?

Now, I ask, how is the river of your life flowing? How is its health? Are the waters crystal clear, or are they murky, veiled by the algae growth, that is slowly sucking the remaining life out from beneath the surface? Are fish friends or food, or maybe both? Is the river supplying your needs, bringing refreshed waters, a bountiful of fish, a shade tree upon its shores, and other natural wonders simply from its renown presence? Are beavers present, helping dam up paths which do not benefit the greater purpose and create distracting eddies of stagnation instead? Do ducks drift along its surface and dive beneath its waves? Or has all life diverted elsewhere, where uncharted waters must be discovered and tributaries followed to their source?

No matter its condition, there is hope in its renewal. The beautiful side of the funny thing life is, is that we get to choose how we interact with the river. We can pay it no mind, leaving trash and reckless aluminum cans along its shores. We can give it some thought, and appreciate the natural beauty it represents from a distance. We can dilly dally along its shores, dipping a toe in to test the waters and backing away from its chill. Or we can dive right in, becoming an active participant in its currents, letting it carry us alongside driftwood and ducks, fish and feelings, and most of all, as something separate from our being, but immersible nonetheless.

Happy floating.

Much love,

Jenn