Waterway's Rest

A journal entry for spring

Lately, I dream of gardens and flowers. I dream of mountain peaks with pagodas and rivers with water as clear as the sky, nearly light enough to breath. I dream of flowers like glass or blue silk, like ice or wine suspended in cruciform bowls, hanging like golden bells from tightly spaced stalks in the shade of oak and walnut. It is springtime in these dreams, and it is spring outside as well. Everything is in bloom, is shining green or pink. Redbud proffers bouquets in flagrant purple beside the road.

We went to the creek today, and the water was clear in its shallows, then where it got deeper turned green, then glacier blue. Later in the year, baked by the sun, it will be all green, like lily pads or jade. But for now it is a blue possible only for water in certain seasons, when the snow thrown on the mountaintops melts and carries down to the valley something of the sky in itself, a whisper of its storehouse above.

I stood for a long time while my kids made castles out of mud. I stared at the river and saw—all rivers are rivers of light. Their surfaces glimmer and slide in great avenues of light, snakes of twining silver shining the whole way to the sea.

I let me eyes blur, just slightly, and was carried along in that many-colored light, and it evoked the strange sensation of moving while also standing still. This is, after all, one of the river’s great mysteries, its movement-in-rest.

For a river, from the small creek to the broad Mississippi, is restful. It may change its banks from time to time, just as a sleeper might shift or roll over, and it is true that a river may crash or rage or flood. And yet, most days, in most reaches of the waterway, it is restful. The water passes in silence, in peace, nearly still in its consistency. The same rises and falls occur across the same rocks. The same bends roll past known monuments and groves. The water’s surface and track have a topography that can be mapped, predicted, and relied upon; each section can be learned by heart.

Yet, on another level, there is nothing stable, nothing predictable, about a river. Look long enough upon its sliding face and you see an infinity of ripples overlapping, spreading in all directions even as they flow with the whole mass of water, breaking and dissolving, shining and sinking. No particle of the whole follows an obvious route; no sinuosity is unaffected by the other lines bending semi-parallel unto every other. And, of course, no water is ever the same but always new and ever young.

The flow and surface of a river are a mystery, and how this motion can be contained within the water’s rest, within the course of its banks, is the mystery of the unknown in the known, or the infinite in its creation.

Standing by the river and in the vertigo of still movement, I felt kinship with the water, an impulse I can only call animist, or maybe Shintoist. I thought that, of all landscapes, my soul belongs to the rivers, creeks, rivulets, to the slow fall of water descending from Eden. My blood rebounded to the green and glacier blue. My bones hummed riparian. If, in the strange paths of life and death, I should ever have the privilege to be appointed a minor sprite or daemon of a place, a genius loci, it could only be of a river and its banks. And, ideally, it would be a small one, whose turns abound with water rats, and otters, and turtles. I would like to dwell among the dreams of such a waterway, its stories, its life.

The shallow water and the sweet; the rain and the wet, sleek stone; the silt and the willow; all the dappled shade—such are my dreams and the freshness of my mornings. I surrender to the fresh water, to the fresh and humid earth, the blue-glass cups of flowers, the redbud, the melted snow, the sky. All is in motion; all is at rest. It is spring, and for now, before the desert heat of summer, all the waters are running. Thank God.