What is the river in your life?

Photo by alea Film on Unsplash

I turn my face towards the bright light below. I’m in an airplane, two-thousand miles above the desert, and the sun is touching everything in sight. I lean forward in my seat to get a better look and squint my eyes at the dry, endless brightness.

I come from green places. I spent my childhood in the humid valleys of Pennsylvania and now I live in southern Appalachia—a literal temperate rainforest. I’m used to the land being buried in leaves and green and creeks too numerous to name.

But here, flying above the shrubland in the heart of New Mexico, my eyes marvel at the sheer novelty of so much spareness.

Hundreds of miles fly under the body of our plane, marked only by arid clumps of creosote, dry stone, and the wrinkled memory of water running down the thighs of the land. Hill after hill passes and we don’t fly over a single house.

Then, something changes.

It’s so dramatic, I can feel my pupils dilating. I sit up straighter in the small box of my airline seat.

Suddenly there is an edge of green—bright, glittery, moving. There are roads, winding around one another like streams. There are houses. First just a few, and then they get dense as cliff swallow nests. There are playgrounds and verdant fields and trees and trees and trees. My brain struggles to catch up to the sudden change, until I crane my face closer to the thick plastic window and see it.

The river.

In this case, the Rio Grande—big river, wild river, P’osógeh (Place of the Big Water)—curving boldly through the landscape.

I look down in awe.

In a whole, wide, uninhabitable world—places where we, as humans, cannot long survive, where our vulnerable bodies were not designed to be, there is suddenly this—the river.

Suddenly there is not only the possibility to survive, but to thrive. To drink. To live. To build a home. To feel at home in this world.

I knuckle unexpected tears out of the corners of my eyes. I’m just so moved by the tenderness of it all. Of us humans, with our water bodies, finding places to live in this world. Places where—despite the harshness of what surrounds us—we can survive.

And I realize—as I watch the body of the water move beneath me and something in my own animal body relaxes and rejoices just for having seen it—

That we all have rivers in our lives.

The places where we can be sustained.

The waterways that make the uninhabitable habitable again.

The things that flow through us, bold as angels, giving us life.

Those things that when we find them—after years of searching, sipping water from the heart of cactuses and hiding in the hottest parts of the day—we must fall on our knees in gratitude, because these are the things that will save us.

We know them, because when we are within them, immersing ourselves in the baptism of what-we-love, we think—Maybe I do still want to be alive? Maybe it is possible, after all, for me to love this life?

We all have rivers in our lives—it’s just about recognizing them for what they are.

So what is the river in your life?

What is the thing, or things, that give you life?

That which, when you immerse yourself within it, you feel revived?

Is it writing?
Is it walking?
Is it puzzles or bird watching or planting peonies?

Is it singing or batch cooking or traveling to places where no one knows your name?

We don’t need many rivers, after all to stay alive.

But we do need one.

Whatever your river, or rivers might be, mark them. Know them. Call on them. Make a map if you need to.

Write down the names of the rivers in a note on your phone. So when you are lost, you will remember how to find home again.

(On the airplane, as we descend into the broad river valley below, I write: “As long as I am writing and dancing, I will be alright.”)

And when you are parched…
When you have gone too long without water…
When what you are wearing is too tight…
Take off your clothes and climb into the body of the water.
Drink in big gulps as you swim, swim into the middle of your life.

This river was designed to keep you alive.

This river has been beckoning you to come, live, all this time.

The Earth needs rivers that are clean with your joy.

Because your life—truly lived—is part of what brings the world alive.