A Meander
The rains came yesterday morning and have continued, steadily. Not warm rain, but a deep and welcome soak for the rooted folk in trees and the gardens and an invitation for humans to focus inward. It has slowed me right down to cocoon state; I’m tucked under a woollen blanket, utterly surrendered to the drumming on my roof and the taste of my first coffee. This is a timeless cocoon, where fragments of ‘what has been’ drift up into my awareness from stuffed-down places; I notice and then let them float on down the intelligent river. Some memories I don’t need to keep.
Robert MacFarlane has written a book called Is a River Alive?. I found my own copy yesterday in an excellent and beautifully curated independent bookstore (A Different Drummer Books, in case you want to call them up and order something excellent). It is a morning to follow MacFarlane’s intentional, life-changing meanders as the rain applauds the shingles above my head and drips through the roof onto the garbage bag I’ve covered my desk with. Water, she moves. She finds ways to move, as Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq from Greenland offers to Gabor Mate three years ago in a panel discussion about climate trauma. I will take my copy of MacFarlane’s book to a gathering Tuesday next where he will speak about what he has learned in the making of it. I’m lucky to have such a rare opportunity to meet an author I have deep respect for, to ask for his personal mark on a title page.
I wonder why it’s terrifying for us to imagine letting go of what we’ve been, what we’ve collected. Why so difficult to release the places and names we remember and their historical significance in our evolutions and revolutions. Why so painful, this thought that we will forget the traumas that changed our lives, the perpetrators we so reviled, the co-dependencies that killed our joy. My current day job is in a dementia care facility as a PSW and an arts activation specialist; I find these questions deeply interesting. I’ve noticed that it’s not the residents who have the most emotional trouble with memory loss, it’s their families.
[In my health care role I’ve noticed many other things too, about human nature, but these are for a different essay in which all identities will be fiercely protected]
Both my folks died with great dignity and both by their own choice. Dad, whose mind was all but gone but whose intelligent heart was aware and awake chose to stop eating. Mom booked a lethal injection for herself in another country and flew with her courage to meet it. Two deaths full of mystery, intention and love that have changed what I understand about Life. I find am quite unable to judge anyone’s choices now, however strange they seem on the surface of things.
My experiences through the aging and death of my parents inspired me to explore, in my day job and my studio how we humans can Let Go of things but never actually lose ourselves. We do lose old identities and connections that are worn out, that have shifted. Sometimes, often, this is painfully bewildering. Loss when not consciously chosen can feel like a betrayal – worse – a self-betrayal, so that rage and dangerous behaviour is understandable, expected, difficult to witness. For others ageing is a choice point, a graceful curiosity: what would happen if I just let it all go. What would happen if I move with this rather than against it.
To meander is to slow down, to bend around things so as to know them, touch them gently before moving on through this curve to the next. It’s like a labyrinth, but also a passage through a place, a task – any experience, consciously or not. Grief is a long and deep meandering, a complex negotiation with completion. A course of study is a different, better charted passage – not just a means to an end, but a choice to broaden awareness. A meander is by nature transformational, uncomfortable because we don’t know what lies ahead, can’t control the outcome, that we must change and evolve, that we must fail until we don’t fail. It can be painfully overwhelming, the struggle to master a difficult skill, the deliberate blind steps to an obscure goal, the stumbled, humbling dance of building a relationship with anything or anyone new. Every change, every step into new understanding is a death of what was and these little deaths, like physical ones, are irreversible.
From this perspective death is not a dark thing just because it is difficult. It is a deep bend in the river, a shake-up of what we thought was permanent, but also entirely natural. We have such dread and fear of death in our culture. If we talked about it with due respect and open curiosity might we manage our fear of it better? Might we find the courage to make some structural, cultural changes in our policies for Elder Care? Might we change our belief that it is acceptable for anyone to profit from caregiving, that care workers can be exploited, burned out and underpaid to ensure these profits – I wonder about this, about how disrespect and profit so often nourish each other.
[Disclaimer here: I refer to our current health care system as a whole and not to any specific facility. There are wonderful, new innovative approaches to Elder Care that are working beautifully now.]
Rivers meander and, as MacFarlane so beautifully and explicitly demonstrates, rivers are alive. Human beings are 98% water by molecular count (see Veda Austin, in her astonishing book about water) and so it follows – we too meander through our lives with mysterious intention, over and around obstacles. In so doing we shed what no longer serves and move forward into the new.
The propellor for a decent meander could be curiosity, since to be curious is to wonder, to inquire, investigate (by contrast, to be fearful is to block, protect, resist, control, fight, cling to victimhood). “Curious, he moves towards this strange new thing. With each deliberate step forward familiar things around him shift – uncomfortably, but not threateningly. Another few steps and He can feel himself begin to change. Forward he goes, awkwardly, in wonderment..”. This is what we do every day, us humans, when we’re not shut down by fear and exhaustion.
What do we seek as we approach the ocean we call ‘death’. Certainly if we resist and cling to what was, if we deny ourselves the experience of letting go of what no longer serves Us-All (Yunkaporta, Emergence Magazine), we will continue to build dams made of fear, straight roads through rainforests, laws that deport, walls that starve, bombs and tech made for genocide. For example.
What does Water seek as it moves, I wonder. Experience? Connection? I don’t know, but I’m bloody well curious, since I’m made of water myself.
Rainfall drums on my roof and drips over my desk into the plant tray. Birds chirp their news outside, and ah – there is the bell of the mid-morning train as it grinds through Gage and Main. Coffee is cold; this is my cue to rise and step into the forward flow of today’s tasks.
But I’ll take a minute here to acknowledge that the rains have given me a rich pause when balmy weather would have sent me into early action. This is a time full of deep choices for me, in which each path, each project is worthy of full respect and consideration. What do I choose to curve around, to touch and be changed by. What is my intention, now, my curiosity. What calls me to move, however uncomfortably, into what I don’t yet know. It has been a short meander this morning, but a good one.
Here’s a brief list of recommended books, each linked to reviews/ more info. Each one of these has challenged my beliefs about Us-all, about how and where we live. (Note: if you order books online, please consider ordering from an independent bookseller. They do more to connect people and ideas in community than any box store, and they could use your love and support.)
Veda Austin (New Zealand), The Living Language of Water (2025)
Diana Beresford-Kroeger (Canadian Botanist), To Speak for the Trees (2019), Our Green Heart (2024) *Penguin
James Bridle (UK), Ways of Being (2022). What a rich joy of a book – I’ve given away several copies & will give more.
David G Haskell (UK), A Forest Unseen (2012), The Songs of Trees (2017)* Guardian review, Sounds Wild and Broken (2022)* Kirkus review
Robert MacFarlane (UK), Is a River Alive? (2025), and also anything else he has written- google his list.
Suzanne Simard (Canada, Prof. of Forest Ecology, UBC), Finding the Mother Tree (2021) *Kirkus – also follow her current research, which is changing the way we understand forests and foresting
Tyson Yunkaporta (Aboriginal Australian), Sand Talk (2019); Right Story/Wrong Story (2025) and Emergence Magazine. He has published some excellent podcasted interviews you can find on Apple+, Spotify and elsewhere.