The Marys River of My Youth

I watched the river from dawn 'til dusk, from season to season, year to year, and I found myself moving inward and evolving with it. The river, fluid in its motion and flexible in its moods, instructed me in the current of life, that I might navigate it safely without undue resistance and thus without tiring. The river's song informed me that I was a vital but momentary passing, like everything borne on its current, from birth to maturity to death to memory to birth again in some other form-an atom in a water lily, a catfish, or a tiger beetle. Its mixing of the two ingredients, silt and water, taught me that creation and extinction are no more than seemingly opposite sides of the same dynamic-change-that manifests itself through the irreversible novelty of eternal becoming. But, the most valuable lesson of all was that obstacles are temporary and can be transcended with patience, persistence, and the accrual of insight.