In late summer, I would swim and stream-walk a small section of the Raccoon River. While sedimented for decades now, the water was clear in the shallows. For a few years now, the water is pea-green from edge-to-edge. For decades and worse now, this water has strongly contributed to a vast hypoxia zone in the Gulf.

In the 1980s, I wrote about the wisdom of the river, focusing on the Des Moines River as a living, very open metaphor for the essential streaming dynamic of the universe that is within us as well in the streaming of our body metabolism and thought.


Wednesday, September 7, 2016

A World Completing Us As We Become Aware Of It


Lance Kinseth, View From Goat Hill

Our way out of a growing global desert, out of our warring with ourselves and with the landscape may be simpler than we could have ever imagined.  If we will bring to these landscapes our sensibility and not just our measures, we can come to resemble the harmony that we discover there.  As Alfred North Whitehead writes in The Adventure of Ideas, “The experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose.  It comes as a gift...” Perhaps when we can seriously honor the overlooked events of the landscape, we will have developed both the wisdom and the will to receive this gift.  In all landscapes there is that powerful commonness that hold the world together.  It is river eternal, the streaming beyond appearances, the inseparability that makes one thing also the other, that is nothing but cooperation and fittedness.
Lance Kinseth, River Eternal: The Wonder of Common and Ashen Days Alongside a Prairie River


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