Listening to the River

I like river images as a way to invoke the flowing connection between seemingly separate things in life.

I grew up beside the Saint Lawrence River, as it flows south of Montreal Island on its way from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. I swam in it, sailed and rowed across its three-mile width countless times during the years I was growing up in Canada. I feel that I come honestly by my river metaphors.

I go straight to river metaphors when I want to invoke images of the nourishment flowing into me from natural environments; or the inherent connections that joins my life to the life around me. Going within, I envision a flowing dynamic that prevents every molecule, thought and feeling from hardening and becoming an artifact relegated to times no longer present. I see a spiritual and social dynamic carrying all living beings forward from beginning to endings, mirroring the path that water takes as it flows across the land.

Rivers have their source, perhaps in far off mountains, and they have their destination (the oceans that cover 70% of our planet’s surface). Clouds–arising into the welcoming arms of winds and passing over marshes, cities, deserts and forests—feed the rivers and cycle through air, earth, light and dark, as the Sun turns its paddlewheel in time and space.

This past week, driving to a bookstore, where the president of the Survivor of Suicide organization interviewed a recently retired New Mexico financial official, we crossed the Rio Grande River. Or rather, we crossed a bridge over where the Rio Grande should have been.

I discovered in the interview that there is a team of elected lawmakers and career officials who work together to create budgets that apportion limited resources among competing programs. What really grabbed my attention was that all available chairs in the bookstore were full of senators and state employees who had come to hear this retired man talk about his forty years working at the NM Roundhouse. The process of creating state budgets was unfamiliar to me; since news clips about the legislature convening for a special session to reconcile and approve a budget give little clue that there is a team for whom this process is personally important.

Driving across the bridge to the west side of Albuquerque on the way to this talk, I saw no evidence that there was a team pulling together to keep the river flowing. In fact, nothing was flowing. The Rio Grande River had simply disappeared.

I understand that the workings of a team of people in the NM Roundhouse who keep resources flowing was a revelation to me. But how did I not know that the Rio Grande had vanished from the face of the land? I thought I knew rivers better than that.

The bridge was still there, the Bosque with its swath of trees and vegetation was there, still a wide swath of green in the desert. But where a flowing river had once been, there was now only sand.

I can feel my metaphor of flowing water, with Mother Earth carrying buckets of water to where they are needed, starting to crack; in its place, the face of a pilgrim staggering across a desert, one faltering step at a time.

I find myself wondering. If the desert does reclaim New Mexico, as this part of the world is short-changed while deluges fall on the eastern states, submerging already flooded landscapes; drowning towns and fields that would gladly let the passing winds keep their precious cargo until mountains can catch clouds full of treasured rain and stitch it into streams and rivers, including the Rio Grande where I live. I find my metaphor of a river of life, flowing, nourishing, connecting, allowing new life to spring up in surprising places, becoming a fading memory from another time.

Will I need to find a new metaphor if the aquifer that the southwestern states draw upon is finally drained dry, if clouds carrying rain do not come this way, not in time to fill the Rio Grande and bring water to fields south of Albuquerque? If the desert reclaims New Mexico, if blowing sand fills the eyes of pilgrims uncertain where they can go, or whether they will be welcomed anywhere, will I have to find another metaphor to accompany my own final heart beats? Will my new metaphor be of dust devils dancing across highways empty of wagons, across a parched landscape in which no hoof beat can be heard and tumbleweeds are the only travelers left to hitch a ride on the passing wind?