To Live as the River Flows

On my self-imposed writing retreat in Bali

When I was on a road trip in the south of France with my mother one summer, we came upon a river that ran through the outskirts of a medieval village. Of course we had to stop. And walked up its hot pebbled bank until we came to a part deep enough to plunge into. I thought of the Irish poet John O’Donohue’s words:

I would love to live as the river flows,

carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.

Today I’m waking up in the jungle of Bali, my hotel room terraced over the banks of a river, and I remember his prayer. And I remember the mint-scented river by my great-grandmother’s house in Spain that the village called the Black Well for its inky depths; the East River in New York whose banks I would frequent at night to smoke cigarettes with my friends and discuss Milan Kundera and the Qur’an; I remember the Ganges river where I saw a corpse for the first time, the brisk River Dart in Devon along whose banks I fell in love, and the Seine of Paris who caught my heart when it broke.

I remember Mary Oliver’s treasured River Clarion and the ways she says it spoke to her, and told her it is part of holiness, and not to blame the river for nothing happening quickly.