What the River Keeps

Motion, Change, and Letting Go

There’s a river behind my cabin. I go there often. It’s become a kind of companion. It asks for nothing, yet somehow gives everything back. During spring runoff, it rages; in the dead of winter, it gurgles beneath the ice. It folds and spins, collides against stone, gathers itself, then releases again. It never stops moving.

The sound draws me in, especially at day’s end, when the light softens and the world begins to let go. Something in it settles the noise inside me. The river carries what it must and lets go of what it can’t. Every branch, every leaf, every stone finds its place in time. What resists gets reshaped. What releases moves on, becoming part of the larger flow.

I’ve watched it in flood too—rising, carving new paths, uprooting what no longer belongs. Even chaos serves the flow. When the waters recede, they leave behind a rearranged truth.The landscape changes, but the river remains itself.

I used to think surrender meant giving up. But the river knows better. At times I stand my ground, trying to make the river go my way—then wonder why I’m torn apart by its pull. When I stop fighting the current and move with it, I find a rhythm that feels natural. When I let go, the unknown becomes a friend.

Some days, persistence looks like swimming upstream—pushing through the cold, the fatigue, the doubt. Other days, it’s floating, conserving strength, allowing myself to be carried for a while.

The river mirrors the human heart. We surge and rest. There are seasons when we overflow, and others when we run thin. Yet something in us keeps moving to the pull of what’s ahead. The current’s resilience is our resilience.

The same river that shapes the land moves through us too. It changes everything it touches but stays true to itself. Its truest lesson is that to live well is to move with life, not against it, and to trust that each letting go is how life begins again.