Flowing Waters
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How lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. Over time the river itself also changes. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers—the Nile, the Ganges, the Yangtze, and the Mississippi must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
“Are people like that?” I wondered. “Am I like that?” Me, like the river itself, always flows but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering with hardly any visible movement tranquilo, sometimes gurgling giocoso with pleasure, and always, I hope, amoroso.
“Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, bursting my banks when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and other times drying up from lack of rain? Will I grow and deepen? Will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to damn me up so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for their own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?”
river runs always
on its own way, curved or straight
whether light or dark
swift flowing river
water cutting through the earth
onward to the sea
Copyright ©
Sara Etgen-Baker
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