Two: What the River Knows

From my window I can see the River Nene. She has been flowing past Cotterstock since before there was a Cotterstock.

She has been flowing since before there were names for what she is — and what she is, is what I am. The same sacred life, wearing different forms. The Druids knew this. They did not worship the river. They recognised themselves in her.

She reflected the candlelight from the collegiate windows for two hundred years. She has received the grief of everyone who ever stood on her bank and wept, and she has kept moving, and she has carried everything to the sea.

Rivers don’t accumulate. They flow. Whatever they receive, they carry forward and release.

In the Taoist tradition, water is the great teacher — yielding, persistent, finding its way around every obstacle, wearing down stone not by force but by faithfulness. The highest good is like water, wrote Lao Tzu. It nourishes all things without striving.

What if this is not a metaphor? What if the water and I are not two things, one of which might teach the other — but one life, briefly wearing different forms, remembering itself through the meeting?

What might it feel like to live like a river?

Not to hold onto what has passed through me — the grief, the joy, the love that changed its shape, the losses that still have edges — but to carry it gently, and release it, and keep moving?

The river doesn’t distinguish between me standing on her bank and the pilgrim and the poet and the farmer and you. She simply receives.

What would it mean to be received like that — without judgement, without condition, without the need to be anything other than what I am, flowing?

What am I still carrying that the river — that I — might be willing to release?

I walk by the Nene most mornings. She is never the same twice. She is always just as she is.