Gaian Births

In Northern Minnesota, nestled in the crystalline air that blows through waving pines, is a passage of clear water flowing over smoothed rocks. It’s shallow, if one braves the almost spherical forms of the creekbed, one can walk across it, bathe their feet in it. This is nothing special for the area, one of countless little pearls of lakewater dotted about the trees and snow. Yet its waters are a beginning, for as Lake Itasca drains each fractional drop of itself over that rocky precipice, it sets that water tumbling on a journey downriver, to begin what we call, the Mississippi.

By the time this water reaches the Atlantic Ocean via the Gulf of Mexico, it’s changed. An entire continent’s worth of dilution and flow has made it fatigued and dirtied, turbid now to blackness and slow to complete stagnancy, it turns into swamp - a putrid petri dish of hypertrophy that makes the border-region between Louisiana and Mississippi. Even further upriver, before it’s slowed to a dead halt, the water fares no better, a muddy, polluted and infested slow moving lake that lazily snakes through Missouri and Arkansas and all the other states we rather not speak of.

Motion can be set forth, activated, yet it cannot be controlled. Broad strokes can be - if one were to dam the river in strategic locations, a new inland sea could be made, the little breaking of the water of the hill forms the great mid-continental passage… but it can’t be dominated, it can’t be made mechanical, as much as one might want it to be.

This is the lesson we have to learn from rivers - all action is reducible to something done on a river. Are you setting off a new stream, breaking rock to burst water from stone? Are you birthing a new waterway and letting erosion and fertility come as it may, or are you sailing the river, leading to the ocean, braving tides? Are you damming, backing water up to flood and stagnant and form new bodies interior to the landmass?

Either way, you cannot control it - only act upon it.