Water Meditation

Civilization is recent and fleeting. Nature ― as far as we know ― is eternal. Water is fluid, clear, and shapeless.

Emerson used flowing water imagery and metaphors for water in his essays and poems. In the essay Nature, published in 1836, Emerson asks,

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?

Water represents fluidity, transcendence, and spiritual insight. Water reminds us of the fickle and fleeting nature of how we perceive time.

Emerson encouraged independent thinking and imagination over convention. He reveled in the spiritual nature of natural phenomena.

Hyalite Creek

Appreciation for natural phenomena like the force of flowing water, the mechanics of an avalanche, the phases of the moon, or the life cycle of a mayfly invariably leads us to the vast infinity of poetry. 

Water
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The water understands
Civilization well;
It wets my foot, but prettily,
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted:
Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy:
Ill used, it will destroy,
In perfect time and measure
With a face of golden pleasure
Elegantly destroy.

REFERENCES

• Nature, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1836), Wikipedia.

Pools and Riffles

In gravel bed rivers, alternating sequences of pools and riffles develop as the cross-section of flow alternates between shallow and deep terrain.

Pool-riffle sequences commonly occurs at intervals of 5 to 7 stream widths.

Pools and riffles are prime habitat for trout. The wavy surface and turbulence of riffles hide trout from predators like raptors and humans.

Gallatin River

photo: Bob MacNeal

Communities of insects grow to maturity in riffles providing the primary food source for trout. River current dislodges nymphs from rocks. Nymphs are the immature form of invertebrate insects. Drifting nymphs provide an intermittent stream of sustenance for trout who face upstream and maintain a stationary position relative to direction of flow to minimize the energy they must expend to feed.

Trout prefer the higher dissolved oxygen content found in riffles. Riffles tend to be 1-3 feet deep, while pools are often much deeper.

“If you have not touched the rocky wall of a canyon. If you have not heard a rushing river pound over cobblestones. If you have not seen a native trout rise in a crystalline pool beneath a shattering riffle, or a golden eagle spread its wings and cover you in shadow. If you have not seen the tree line recede to the top of a bare crested mountain. If you have not looked into a pair of wild eyes and seen your own reflection. Please, for the good of your soul, travel west.”
― Daniel J. Rice, This Side of a Wilderness

REFERENCES

• This Side of a Wilderness, by Daniel J. Rice.
• Pool-riffle sequence, Wikipedia.

Falls

Urami Waterfall
by Kobayashi Kiyochika

Waterfalls are formed when a river is young, but formation gradually occurs over several thousand years.

Rivers flow over strata of rock that vary in resistance to erosion. As rapid river flow scours a channel into a less erosion-resistant stratum below, it transports loose material downstream thus increasing the slope of the watercourse.

As the flowing water carries the softer rock downstream, the riverbed becomes steeper. Gradually the slope increases to the point where rapids become a waterfall.

As a plunge pool develops, turbulence and whirlpools in the water undercuts the soft rock.

Illustration by Jerry Crimson Mann

After a long period as a fully-formed waterfall, the hard rock overhang can slowly retreat upstream to form a river canyon as the hard rock is eventually eroded and carried downstream.

“When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.”
― Jack Gilbert, Collected Poems

Selandjafoss, Iceland
by Martin Meeks

Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys.
― Mary Hunter Austin

REFERENCES

• How Waterfalls Work, John Fuller, How Stuff Works.
• Plunge Pool, Wikipedia.
• The Classic Works of Mary Hunter Austin, Mary Hunter Austin
• Waterfall, Wikipedia.

The River is Ice

Flowing water is a multipurpose literary metaphor. The course of life is like a river — what we need we carry along and what we don't need, or can't carry, settles out.

In Ask Me, William Stafford considers a future time when the river is ice when he might answer questions reconciling his life.

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

— William Stafford

Stafford writes of the silent river and reflects upon its stillness, yet he acknowledges its undercurrents.

Frozen rivers, lakes, and ponds make us aware of the seasonal passage of time, the prospect of the suspension of time, and of objects temporarily frozen in time. Objects seemingly frozen in time, like sticks and leaves frozen in ice, invite inspection.

John Haines compares the alder leaves and gleaming pebbles frozen in ice to a night sky with its fixed planets and stars.

"I bend over, looking at the debris caught there in the clear, black depth of the ice: I see a few small sticks, and many leaves. There are alder leaves, roughly toothed and still half green; the more delicate birch leaves and aspen leaves, the big, smooth poplar leaves, and narrow leaves from the willows. They are massed or scattered, as they fell quietly or as the wind blew them into the freezing water. Some of them are still fresh in color, glowing yellow and orange; others are mottled with grey and brown. A few older leaves lie sunken and black on the silty bottom. Here and there a pebble of quartz is gleaming. But nothing moves there. It is a still, cold world, something like night, with its own fixed planets and stars."
— John Haines

Frozen leaves and planets and stars in the night sky create an illusion of the fixed and unchanging.

REFERENCES

• The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness by John Meade Haines. 2000, Graywolf Press.
• William Stafford Archives.