Good Neighbors
As the world changes around us, I’ve been asking myself, “What can we learn from the river right now?”
Rivers make great teachers. Turning to them for answers is only logical.
Seems we’re “jello-walking” now, taking tentative steps forward, stabilizing for two seconds, then feeling everything go all wiggly again under our feet.
What keeps coming up for me are age-old rules of living in peace on water.
River, rival—both words have their roots in the Latin rivalis, meaning, “to use the same stream.” Those who use the river for a given purpose necessarily conflict with other users, other lives . . .
. . building the bank higher on one side of the stream simply spirals flow toward the other, where banks are often less fortified . . . raising riverbanks simply requires more banks to be built up in response.
— from Sacrament: Homage to a River (Heyday Books, 2013), photographs by Geoff Fricker, prose by Rebecca Lawton
When we put ourselves first, we do things like raise levees without talking to our streamside neighbors. Maybe we don’t consider how elevating banks on our side will change the way currents hit them.
Or how young folk on the opposite shore will be watching and learning.
Often we lose turf as a natural consequence of protecting our possessions without regard to others.
Then the river, in her wise way, sends changes across the water and farther downstream, and—eventually—the streambed’s entire profile has to adjust. Changes work back upstream, as the system seeks equilibrium.
Acting in self-motivated ways, a neighbor might unwittingly destroy his own real estate. It may happen a little at a time, but he does destroy it.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
— Scottish conservationist and writer John Muir
The river shows us: there’s nothing great or first about acting just for ourselves. Doing so brings only trouble for others now and us later—or all at once. We see it happen every day in watersheds, neighborhoods, and nations.
The planet is a system. I don’t have to remind you of this. The river, too, is a world. Here, everyone and everything are hitched; our actions cause reactions on the river and in its floodplain, on the globe and in our universe.
We may not have all the answers, but I do believe the river does. Now is a good time to remember that we all inhabit this one, united, watery neighborhood. We can’t live here well without tending our neighbors.
With love and water,
Yes, yes, and yes! The river teaches if we learn; otherwise she’s just going along doing what she does. I love this about raising banks without regard to the river and her neighbors. Same is true of the ocean–you put a breakwall in front of your property and the neighbor’s yard disappears. It’s beyond time to consider others.