there are snakes in every river

took this photo of him on wed. he was so happy.

Has this ever happened to you? It’s a weird thing where you’re so deep in really focused thoughts -- the kind of thoughts where you’re untangling some things in your mind -- when something starts happening around you that seems so relevant to the thought that you begin to wonder if you’re imagining what you saw?

Know what I mean? Let me tell you what happened today. Maybe it’ll make sense within some context.

So, I took the morning off. I had our babysitter come to spend the morning with Arie so that I could take my books and head for the river. 

I knew I wanted to go back to the river because I took Arie there on Wednesday. We had been meeting some friends and for some reason, I was feeling really drawn to this specific stretch of the river, so we met there. It ended up being a positively glorious day -- no exaggeration. It was perfect. Sunny and warm but not humid; a total anomaly for Georgia in June. Arie was so happy and content to play on the riverbank for several hours, and I was enjoying being there with him so much. It was such a peaceful, restful morning for us both.

I had to figure that this recent fond memory was partly fueling my desire to get back there. But then I also noticed myself having thoughts like these: maybe we need to find a way to build a tiny little vacation house on the river somewhere. Or, maybe we should just sell our house and come live here on the river. I mean, not sure about you, but any time I am having thoughts about hypothetically considering picking up my life and moving it somewhere else, one of those imaginary indication lights flips on in my internal dashboard and I begin to wonder...what is going on with me?

So I started to ask myself: what is it about this river? Why here? Why now? I know that humans generally feel drawn to water because it is in some way soothing to us. I started to consider how this river is different from other bodies of water. For one thing, this water is headed somewhere. It has a direction. Not like the ocean, which moves in a life-sustaining, routine way. Not like a lake, which sort of just hangs out and invites you to come, relax, stay awhile. Not at all like a fountain, which shoots water out in a hundred directions only to be sucked up and spat out, again and again.

I feel just like a fountain, I realize, and yet I want to be like a river.

I know all of this sounds really kind of silly but right as I’m thinking, yes, I want to be just like this river, let me embody this river -- just then, I spied a snake, swimming upstream, right toward the rock I was sitting on by the riverbank.

As a rule, I do not like snakes. Word on the street is that some people apparently do like snakes, but I do not. And this snake had some really peculiar timing, if you ask me.

Right as the river is imparting some of its very treasured secrets to me, this goes and happens. I was very disturbed by that snake. Probably, in very large part because not two days ago I was letting my son frolic in the shallows of these same waters (against my better judgement, but I let it happen in the name of fun) and I could not help but feel very scared for what could have (but did not) happen to him, and consequently began to criticize myself for my carelessness.

But even aside from that, I’m thinking, okay...so the moment I start to think that I want to be just like this river, a venomous snake goes and swims up it. What is that about?!

You know, some would say that I was reading too much into it. This is the part where I even began to wonder if I had really seen the snake at all. The timing just seemed too weird to me; maybe I was just making it up as some kind of strange self-sabotage. But no -- I know that I’m not reading too much into it. And I know what I saw. I’d spent the whole morning on the riverbank, enjoying it while admittedly also struggling to settle into a period of rest. As I finally reached a place of rest and began to let my guard down to receive what this moment had for me, I was spooked by a perceived threat. No, the snake did not slither up beside me (but it did disappear below the rock I was sitting on so I did not stick around to see what would happen next. No, I for sure bolted). I turned, again, to curiosity. What am I really afraid of, I started to wonder. 

And that’s when it hit me: it’s not that I feared a snakebite so much as the inconvenience that would come along with it. I was all alone. If I were to be bitten by a snake in that setting, I would have had to urgently seek help from a stranger, and get the help, and all of that would slow me down from getting on with my day. It’s the same reason I fear getting into a car accident. Or being surprised by an illness. Same reason I get annoyed when Arie moves at the pace of a toddler. I am so afraid of, resistant to, in constant avoidance of, being slowed down.

...WHY??

This is something I still don’t have a full answer to. But my hunch is, I don’t want to miss out on making something of myself. I fear wasting my time, and therefore my life. Because like everyone, I’m afraid to die, and I’m still young enough that that fear is heavily cloaked and disguised as other things like, well, the fear of having to stop.

All of this confronted me at the very same moment: I see that my soul is longing for a direction, that my greatest fear is of time lost trying to steadily go in that direction, that I’m holding an invitation to flow, to powerfully move forward, to carve paths through vast landscapes, and that I’m scared to accept the invitation because there might be (there will be) some snakes to overcome.

At the end of the day, this is what I know. The risk of engaging the river, snakes and all, is worth it. I’m scared that I won’t know how to be different; that I will always be agitated at being slowed to some degree. But it’s worth a shot; it’s better than sitting on the riverbank forever and wondering. And I am not willing to let my fears of what might happen stop me from submerging into all of the goodness that certainly will come, even amidst hardship, the risk is worth it. There are snakes in every river, but every river has somewhere to go.