What Rivers Mean to Me: IRU Conservation Associate Ava Isaacson
“I love a river for what it gives me without asking, and for what I am able to give back.”
I love a river because I’ve heard the ancient whispers of wisdom disguised as a birch-soaked scent blowing in the warm afternoon breeze. I love a river for rapid reminders of simplicity tumbling over geologic time capsules. I love a river because without asking she washes away my trivial tribulations, dispensing them among the pebbles and anecdotes of yore.
“I love a river for whether I am in, on, or by the water, I am the best version of myself.”
The love born of a river is miles wide and millennia long. Through landed casts, the river transforms our hands and roughens our toes through saturated, wet-waded euphoria. A river develops our arms, shoulders and passions, rowing heavily alongside currents and oxygenated turbulence. Pondering beneath great riparian cedars, a river offers truths and rhymes that ripen our brains and wax poetic under our pens.
“I love a river for I know that no matter where I go, upon finding one, I will be home.”
I love a river for whether I am in, on, or by the water, I am the best version of myself. Whether executing precise casts, maneuvering inflated freedom, immersing in primordial molecules or writing inspired scripts, the river summons authenticity and comforts vulnerability. Time may be as swift as a rapid, leaving only muscle memory and faith or time can be bid to swell into forever as babbled legends flow over my ears.
I love a river for I know that no matter where I go, upon finding one, I will be home. Love envelopes my psyche and soul in admiration for purity and infinity. Love forms reverence, and reverence builds a deep yearning for reciprocity. My love for the river enriches my life with a necessity to give back, to build a relationship of mutuality and care.
Through connections with wild places and wild rivers, we heal our modernized captive souls. I see myself in the waters, along the shores and this allows me to thrive in the reveries of simplicity and perpetuity.
I love a river for what it gives me without asking, and for what I am able to give back. Not all seek to listen or understand the ancient river language, thereby leaving rivers voiceless. I hear the stories, fables and songs of the waters, and I speak for protections that those sacred places need.
Won’t you take a moment to listen?