Remember the River
What's creatively hydrating you?
This week, we’re flowing with water, and crafting bound spaces for the river of thought and the flow of our lives to pour into: join in for hardcover books and journaling, then flow with ink, breath, and water making marbled paper in Baltimore. Creativity is better together — share this with a friend, and sign up for a workshop.
About a mile from my apartment is a landing. Twenty minutes of walking, some snaking through the streets, and then you’ll arrive. There, a sand laden shoreline, soft and shifting, a beach that gives way into water. Some days the dogs go, free roaming, most days mallards and laughing gulls, a single swan swimming. Each of us animals seeking some soft earth, a sand line, the water, and a break in the concrete.
The river is consistent. Dark and tidal, blue, gold, gray, shimmering at sunset, undulating, rising, and falling with the days’ timing. There is a rhythm that unfolds in the mind, traveling this path to the line of sand, then landing to sit soft by the trees, past broken patches of sidewalk, pausing on planks of wood in this part of the city, body close to a body of water.
These moments by the water are an exhale to my system. By the water, I shift and swell, settle into relaxation — a momentary meeting with joy, contentment, relief, grounding. As if in the hum of the waves calm the mind, my thoughts arrive easily earth-ward simply by existing there, with the river, tuning into the environment, watching the water.
It makes sense to be soothed by the water. Our human forms are more ocean than concrete, more plant unfolding than email or text arriving in an inbox. This patch of soft earth speaks to an innate existence, singing a language of life through gull calls, wind in the space between the leaves, punctuations of silence in dawn before the day wakes. Voices of river tides hum to us, oceans crash and shout, rain whispers like mist, assuring us in a presence beyond words that life is there in the unsaid.
By the water, I turn thoughts from brick and concrete, stiff and stuck, into soft swell of water. Watching the river, body becomes a conduit for the current of life. A wave in sync with experience. Rock and earth, canyons and mountains, moments of harshness, met with enough water and persistence, will shift around and change form. I sit with the water and ask it, how can I flow with this moment? I listen, it speaks. I wonder, and it listens. Gentle, it says. Torrent. Persistence.
Back at my desk, I sit down to the glow of business. To the influx of screens, emails, timing. Soon, subways and trains. Soon, traveling. I look to the glass of water nearby. It moves and shakes as I write, cup catching light through the clear glass, sunlight collaborating to cast shadows, shaky and rippling on the table. The water is still, clear, dotted with air suspended in pockets like pinpricks, constellations of oxygen trapped and formed in the suspension of this atmosphere, held in the space of the glass. Memories float to the mind’s surface: of summer’s heat, long daylight, and swimming as a kid, moments of youngness and pretending. Other shorelines, fewer worries, silent underwater. How I could swim for hours, swirling around, pretending the shine of water was some kind of found gold or treasure, under the surface in silence. I come up for air, channel the flow of mind back to the moment: work, now, in New York, my apartment, no longer a child, but here in my thirties. Memory like hydration. Memories like waves, leaving.
I’m thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh as I sit and sip the water, watching waves of the mind, and ground them down into the words on page. How water in the glass flows from earth to pipe into building into body — a lesson in interdependence despite being in a city. How raindrops fall from the sky to grow crops, tears fall to grieve, each growing, or some pressure system releasing. “Each of us is like the waves and also like the water,” Thich Nhat Hanh says. “Sometimes we're excited, noisy, and agitated like the waves. Sometimes we're tranquil like still water. When water is calm, it reflects the blue sky, the clouds, and the trees.” What are you reflecting?
When I look to water, I feel grateful. It’s creatively hydrating, inspiring. Its nature is my teacher. It shows how to move, how to follow shorelines and flow; shows the gentle upward push of allowing for buoyancy; it nourishes ideas and the mind, collaborating with seed and ground and air and sun to let life take form. It waters the roots of the fig trees from which the smallest leaves and tiny drops of fruit unfold overnight. It swirls, swells, shifts, clears, cleanses, tides, cries, and washes away. Paired with gravity, tears and rain, each water from the lands of our lives fall to the ground. All life as interdependent.
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about nourishing our creative natures, how creativity is a river, and how “[t]he creative force flows over the terrain of our psyches.” Water’s gift as a force is how it flows around obstacles. Obstacle, rock, barrier? Water curls around it. Given enough time, drops of water coalesce, their force evident in places like basins and canyons. Shifting with life’s shorelines, water shows us how to be with our own tides. How to shift states. Estés then speaks to the collective nature of creative practice — how creativity is not solitary act, one defined by our solitary existence, but rather a force we witness together. Like water, it swells and inspires. “One creative act,” she writes, “can cause a torrent to break through stone.”
Water is the life current. It teaches creative adaption, persistence, and flowing Somedays, ideas are waves of sensation: rising, peaking, falling back. A river, roaming, surging, drying. An idea waits, held as a single dot of rain on the end of a leaf after a rainstorm, dew pooling in the morning. Sometimes we may feel tidal, moving in and surging up to the shores of our practices. Sometimes we are satiated, saturated, overflowing. Sometimes we are dry, soaking into ground. Water moves, moves through us, with us, around us.
Much exists in life to separate us from this natural, close-to-the-earth connection. Whole industries benefit from overuse, pollution, and over extraction in throughout the water ways and land masses of our psyches and our minds. “Be wild,” Estés writes. “That is how to clear the river,” and then, “begin; this is how to clear the polluted river.”
At night, I think of water. I hold hand to faucet washing my face, cleansing away the day. I look to worn lines, creases in smile lines, tired eyelids, face like its own shoreline. I think of what hydrates a day, a moment, an idea; what diminishes our flow in life, our connections with nature, the rivers of connections with each other, and with the basins of creative life within ourselves. I take a drink of water. Beyond the moment, the window, down the road, the water still flows. The river still goes.
I write, exist along the coasts of life. Watching thoughts curiously as they ripple up, catching glimmers like sunlike in our psyches, stretches of time that feel less like an ocean at times, and more like an arid skyline. I remember the river, notice the month passing. How bodies wave forward and back catching heat in their movements. How soon after spring in summer sweat will form on the edges of our skin, swelled up in beads, dropping to the ground with their own rhythms, rising heat, embodied salinity. Body like the ocean. For now, an exhale. A clear day, a shoreline. The river is there, hydrating.
for your pages:
What’s the ground you flow into? What waters and nourishes your internal ecology, your communities? What depletes you? How do you move with life and flow with? What holds you? Write about how you are moon, river, tide, float, drip, dew, ocean.
classes and upcoming experiences:
Let’s create together — sign up for a workshop in NYC and beyond.
4/24 Bookbinding: Casing In
4/24 Build Your Journaling Practice
4/25 Suminagashi, baltimore
4/30 Journaling for Intention, online
5/3 Bookbinding: Pamphlet Stitch
5/5 Build Your Journaling Practice, baltimore
5/15 Suminagashi: Meditative Marbling
nourished by, nourishing:
This week I’m nourishing body with movement, balancing. Thinking about cardamom and traveling. Paid subscribers, for more voice and more grounding and slowing into this fast season, there’s a new meditation for you over in Field Guides. Do you like an ambient environment, sound to ground down, or to write with music? Here’s a playlist for slowing. Read my book recommendations here on Bookshop.
studio views:
