The River Will Flow Again

There is no denying we are living in strange times. Many of us are at home for an extended period of time, rarely leaving our homes if at all due to lockdown. A powerful little virus has seemingly taken over our world, determining how our lives look and feel, rapidly dismantling familiar structures, activities, and relationships. For example, how is your relationship to time today compared with how it was two months ago?

Many people I encounter work express feelings about having so much more unstructured time on their hands. A few of us are even busier than usual trying to meet the demands of shifting our lives and work to online formats. For some, the expanded sense of time is very welcome. For others, it is intolerable. Everyone seems to be wondering, when will this end? What will the world, my world, be like when it’s over.

When I go out for a walk I usually include some time walking by our local river. Often it strikes me that, even though so much in our world has stopped with the pandemic, the river keeps flowing.

Yesterday when I went to the river, the tide was low. The River Dart reaches into our little town traveling from nearby Dartmouth, where it enters the ocean. This tidal river reflects the pulsatory nature of all life and all natural phenomena. I had never seen the river this dry before. The riverbed was right there. I could have walked on it. Up to a point. Then there was the usual river fullness just beyond where I was walking.

A lone swan bobbed along on the water, gracefully poking her head into the water at regular intervals. What delicious morsels did she find there? Then she came up right to where I stood witnessing her efforts to find a meal. She looked serene to me. As did the river. Neither seemed disturbed by the current condition of the river, or of the world. They just continued, moving on with their usual activities, adapting to what they met.

As I looked at the dry river bed, it occurred to me that there was no doubt that the tide would rise again. The river might look the same after that, but there would be some ways in which it had changed also. The swan would change her course when the waters rose, but she also would continue with her mission.

It seems so much has dried up during this pandemic. Like the initial shortage of groceries in the stores as people madly rushed to stalk up on essentials (like toilet paper for some reason) before the dreaded unknown set in. With lock down, activity on the streets dried up. Our usually bubbling Elizabethan market town looked like a ghost town. When I look out my window, usually I see people strolling along, cars, bicycles, and an elder or two on scooters. These days, I rarely see anyone. I hear from so many of colleagues in the field of Craniosacral Therapy that their income has dried up. They have no work because this therapy is a hands-on practice and we are to be maintaining safe distance and staying at home. For so many, there is no work and no income now. For too many that means no food on the table, no money to pay rent or mortgage, and certainly no luxurious shopping for clothes, cars, etc. The economy has dried up.

I look at the river at low tide and wonder, how and when will our tide rise again? How might we be changed by thislow tide time and how might we continue to flow? As a practitioner of fluid practices of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy and Continuum, I am familiar with and often teach about the continuity of and ongoing presence of health, wholeness and our fluid nature, even in those times when we have forgotten them. This time is no different. To experience the health however, we need to orient to it.

While much of the planet is very focused on fear and loss at this time, it takes conscious intention to remember there is health even here and now.

I invite you to take a moment now to pause. Allow yourself to be aware of the flow of your breath, in and out, filling and emptying. There is a flow continuing, or you wouldn’t be alive.

If you put your hand over your heart, you might begin to sense it beating. It continues to beat, even when you aren’t aware of it. And it has been doing so since four weeks after you were conceived!

If you ask yourself what speaks to you of health or well-being just now, what comes to you? What reminds you that in this moment you are safe? What is available as support or resource for you? It may be something you constantly rely on but seldom think about, like your toothbrush, the support of gravity under you, or the warmth and light of the sun, the sound of birds, the beauty of trees and flowers emerging this time of year (at least in the norther hemisphere), or the flow of a river.

Whatever your situation, it is true that these times are challenging, that there is loss, that you may feel grief or anger or fear. It is also true that the river continues to flow and the tide will rise again.

This particular pulsation of life may be a slower one than we are comfortable with. Perhaps that is its gift. The pandemic invites or demands for many of us to slow down, to stay home, to live a quieter, more natural life.

Just as spring returns after winter, our lives will find their time to blossom. As we negotiate the unknown, we can perhaps be comforted with this knowing that the river will flow again, despite appearances.