let me be more like the river

…so human and yet so much more powerful, tolerable, compassionate.
What can we pull up from a river? water, soil, serenity, energy?
Giving life, sustaining agriculture, creating play, nurturing the land, changing in the seasons; Expanding and freezing, yet always flowing… even if only a single drip at a time. The river just keeps on going, when oftentimes, and eventually humans simply stop. We stop moving forward.
Wash out the human in me and let me be like the river.

Vast, with multiple tributaries – like a giant Italian family; or singular and reclusive - the only child as a tiny mountain spring. Imagine all of the curvature and rush making up flowing waters that build into a landscape and the fluid contribution to all that is our planet – in every direction, across every land. Pushing beyond banks or retreating, yet always flowing… even if only during a heavy rain. They just continue to live, when we get stopped dead in our tracks at the first sign of pain or confusion. In either great surprise or devastating shock, paralysis follows emotional confusion. And eventually humans simply let go of forward momentum; if not finally, at least for a time to catch up.
This is no option for the river.

The river continues-- it does not sleep, but it devours ravenously. It nurtures, but it does not care. It simply exists in the thoroughness of movement – regardless of the destruction, of the drowning, of the rapids, the damage, the chaos. There is no judgment, only growth and functionality.
Is it ruthlessness, inconsideration, oblivion?
Or is it forgiven in its naturalness, in its inevitability? Maybe we understand the endlessness because there is no mechanism for stopping. Maybe because we want to believe that things can live free and without bridled consequences. Perhaps it is only us who need restraint, as we have cause and meditation and predication for damage – despite our own naturalness, our actions are not by accident. The damage we create is from decision, not biological unavoidability.
We are destructive to one another on purpose, for even the slightest difference, not inevitably… or is it inevitable? Human fear and confusion facilitates destruction, yet the river knows nothing of judgment or difference. Wash out the human in me and let me be like the river.