Shall we gather at the river?

The human body is said to be around 60% water, and our vital organs can contain as much as 83% water.  It's no wonder that good medical advice nearly always includes drinking plenty of water.  It's not something I find easy to do, but as I age, I think I may come to regret it if I don't develop a good water consumption habit.

Some of my favorite hymns are about water and rivers. Flowing water has long been a metaphor for spirit, grief, life, change, renewal, washing away our pain, community, and about a determination to do what is right.  Water is life.  This isn't just a slogan meant to make you feel guilty for driving a car that requires oil that threatens indigenous water supplies. Water is required for life on our planet.  We know this.  And, we are made of water.

Civilizations gather and grow at rivers.  These fresh water sources eventually come to be thought of as property, and with property comes control.  We grow our bodies of water by damming streams and rivers and containing it in reservoirs and tanks.  But water always fights us, and its force nearly always leads it to where it was originally going. Dams break, channels are subverted, diversions find a shortcut and floods come, regardless of our concrete walls and levees.  Last year, I was in the

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/46820/nile-river-delta-at-night

town of Angangueo, Mexico, where a flood and mudslides had destroyed a thousand homes, killing more than 30 people along a stream in February of 2010.  The state's solution was to bury the creek below, where no one can see it.  This has given the residents of Angangueo no peace of mind.  They know that burying the channel is not going to save them in the next big rain event. Water will find its own path. This diversion of the water may cause them a lot of pain.


And, just like the water in our blood and in our big human brains, we find our own paths.  We spend a lot of energy trying to divert the paths of others, trying to manipulate the outcome so that we can reap the benefits of our neighboring water-bodies.  To do so is futile.  I am surrounded by people who I would love to be able to change.  Aren't we all?  But some of those people have been hurt along their journey, and often times those who are hurting will try to hurt others.  We know this to be true.

 Sirens represent the power of
water to challenge
our illusions of control.

  "Hurt people hurt people." But hurt people can also choose a path of healing.  That is their path, their channel, their direction, and their destiny to determine, not mine.  If someone chooses to be kind, they will find a way to be kind.  If someone chooses to criticize me, their criticism might give them the illusion of power to change me, but at most it will divert my flow until I get back onto my own path.

The human in me wants to whine, stomp my feet and complain, "how stupid, this idea that people will be themselves no matter what I do!  I am supposed to be in charge of other people's actions and reactions.  How can I be in control of my life if I can't control those around me?"

I have no power to change anyone.  I am water, you are water.  I can provide stability like deep-rooted plants to someone else's banks. I can offer support, love and compassion when their pain overspills their banks onto others.  If I let other people divert my path, I could be letting them harm me.  I have to assume that when I try to divert others, I am harming them as well.

A Sufi Parable, The Tale of the Sands  

High in a far off mountain, a stream started in a little spring. The stream flung itself at the desert, but each time it did so, it disappeared. But if its destiny was to cross that desert, it would surely find a way.

The wind could cross the desert, and the stream realized that it could allow itself to be absorbed by the wind, carried across the desert as vapor, and reappear on the other side as rain. But the stream didn't like that idea, saying, "I have my own identity... I won't be the same stream that I am now."

Eventually, the stream did allow itself to be carried across the desert by the wind, who carried it beyond the horizon, and let it fall softly at the top of a new mountain, and the stream began to understand who it really was, and what it meant to be a stream.

And that is why it is said that the way in which the Stream of Life is to continue on its journey is written in the Sands. 

A long version of this story can be found here: https://www.schoolofsufiteaching.org/the-parable-of-the-stream-and-the-desert.html