Rivering

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb….” (Revelation 22:1-2)

The river’s method is both simple and devious. It’s objectives are both direct and indirect. It seeks and is always seeking the sea. The sea. The sea. The great wild, dangerous, deadly, teeming, quickening, placid, wine-dark, beryl-colored, lovely, sun-struck, moon-doused, life-infested, tempestuous, white-flecked, windy sea. The emblem of God’s love. The source of life, it is said. The buoyant broad flood.

Both simple and devious. Both guileless and cunning.

It is the river of knowing and forgetting. Of remembering and unknowing. It turns and turns and turns and turns. It pools and rushes and dwindles and increases.

There’s nothing straight-line about a river. A straight-line river isn’t a river. It’s a ditch with water in it. It discovers nothing but mud. Nothing but turbidity and muck-feeding fish. Its discharge is a pollution into the sea of God’s love.

The water of life runs clear because it runs a river. A true river. That progresses by retreating, that descends by ascending, that advances by returning.

The river of the waters of life runs through the mind and the heart. It runs through our lives. And we discover our lives in it. Through it. Because of it.

Its method is indirection. Is irrational. Is circuitous. Is the long way. Is puzzling. Is riddling. Is cascading. Is flattening. Is pellucid. Is clean run.

In its running one hears the very sound of delight. The very beginning of music. God singing in the tongues of the waters. Of the living waters. The very water of waters itself.

The river of the water of life is about itself. Is about its business. Is about joy and the sounds of joy and beauty and the colors and shapes of the beautiful.

To travel in the river of the water of life is to discover what it discovers. Is to flow. Is to turn and return. Is to descend and ascend. Is to fall and recover. Is to surround oneself with the sound of origins. The sound of beginnings. Of quickenings. Is to float and drink one’s fill of the sweet, sweet water. To look deep into the sun-filled sand-bottomed and rock-bottomed river and see everything one might see there. Everything that lives there. The silvery fish and the many-colored fish and the gold-colored fish.

Everything changes as one floats down the river of the water of life. Everything unfolds. Everything becomes. Everything resembles and is new. Each turn. Each bend. Each cascade and each placid stretch.

There are eddies. Boulders. Standing waves. Haystacks. Riffles. Strainers. Pour-overs. Waterfalls. Jets. Holes. Whirlpools. Flats.

But it’s all one. Each turn takes us where we’re going. Each placidity. Each chute. Each discovery. It all is one, and we are in it. Whether we will or no. Its method is our method. Whether we would like to ditch this or not. Whether we would like to make an unrivering sense of things or not. Whether we would like to make a straight-line version of our lives or not. Whether we want to be somewhere else doing something else or not. This is where we are.

Let’s enjoy the float trip. The boat trip. The aesthetic glide and rush and calm. Let’s listen to the mourning doves and the red-winged blackbirds. Watch the turtles dive off their logs into the water and the great blue herons strut like ancient beings, stately beings, beginning of the world beings, in the shallows. Regard the sun dazzle off the water. The moon shimmer off the water. Let’s look at things as they are and see the things that are here. Let us not look elsewhere. We are rivering down the now of the living. The living beauty of the waters. The living concert of the waters. The living dance of the waters. See how the sun-dapple strobes in the ferns under the many leaves. The patches of sun moving in the ferns like excited spirit beings. See how the water rises over the boulder ahead and leaps from it in many directions. Explodes outward into a fine spray that holds rainbow. Rainbow. And now, as we float past, the angle changes, and the rainbow disappears. Feel the cool mist on your skin, like a blessing. Listen to the water. The mighty water. Roaring up its noisy praise.