My heart knows what the river knows. Katie Lee (1964)

My Merlin App is lighting up with migratory birds, all merrily greeting me on this spring stroll in Iron Mine Valley. These wet woods are awash with warblers. Dripping with yesterday’s rain, the earth smells fresh. The river frolics. And the beavers have built an elegant new dam. I came to pursue some blog inspiration. But my mind has already wandered into listening, looking, being present. I didn’t plan it, didn’t expect it. Have I become part of this place, or it part of me?

I’m an organism. I act and react, change and grow, for stagnation can turn to decay. My pulse is unfaltering, flowing from coronary arteries to the tiniest capillaries. I can reproduce myself as well as replenish myself. Though I may look solid, self-contained, I am as permeable as a beaver dam. A greater world lives within me. I host millions of other creatures. They stimulate me metabolically in many ways. I’m in motion too, externally as well as internally, affecting the earth while it affects me.

I receive nourishment from outside (water, food, sunlight) and turn it into energy. I am 50% to 80% water. Water lubricates my circulatory system, transports nutrients, flushes waste and pathogens, regulates temperature. Balances.It’s essential for my health. Every human is, of course, a waterbody: Robert MacFarlane. I make my own enzymes to support many of these functions. My smallest parts, my busy gut microbiome of bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, all work in symbiotic relationships with each other and with me. I’m really a community: I am only healthy when all of us are healthy. Am I perfect, pristine? Nope, but then again, I’ve been around for a while.

I inhale and exhale, bleed, perspire, shed tears, hurt, heal. I remember too. I am an archive, a record, good and bad, of all my past experiences, a library of my life, from birth to maturity to old age. I won’t die; I’ll change.

 “The body of the earth…draws water as its breath instead of air.” L. Da Vinci

Oh, you thought I was talking about myself? Today I found that I’m also the Mount Hope River riparian system. Humans have contemplated this metaphor since Leonardo.

At least seven of Joshua’s Trust’s preserves drain into my valley, enriching me. I am the result of a thousand tiny tributaries, which are the result of a trillion droplets from a billion clouds. It resembles the vascular system. It resembles a neural network: MacFarlane.  I take in cold ground water from an aquifer and cool the air nearby, as well as moderate the environment for my internal citizens. I receive geological ‘nutrients’, (silicon, iron, magnesium, calcium) from my banks, from my streambed, and from my own headwaters; they regulate my pH and nourish algae. These phytoplankton feed zooplankton (diatoms) which in turn feed my ‘gut microbiome’ – aquatic insects: mayflies, caddis, stoneflies, and more. Organic detritus from my riparian corridor washes in and enriches them further.

To compensate for my relentless direction seaward, most of these insects fly upstream when they briefly mature into airborne insects to lay their eggs. And in turn they support populations of trout, minnows, sculpins, crayfish, frogs. ‘Organs” if you like. My ‘skin’ and ‘hair’ are composed of willows, oaks, muskrats, maidenhair ferns, orioles.

I am an archive, a record of all my experiences. I converge, grow, contribute. I evolve, dissolve, mist, flood, evaporate. I don’t die; I change.

Mosquitoes and wet feet aren’t bothering me as I reverse course, smiling, at the trail’s end. Those of us who fly fish (for me, it’s been 50+ years) know that rivers are alive. They have personalities – and spirits. Today I was briefly inhabited by the spirit of the Mt. Hope River’s East Branch and thus learned something all over again. Each of us is not merely a body and a mind. No dam can enclose us. We are porous, diffuse; we spread out into the world through thoughts, emotions, and actions, and it all returns, soaks into us – like water.

George Jacobi

Quotes are from “Is A River Alive”, Robert MacFarlane, 2025