Go as a River

by Shelley Read

He strolled slowly, casually, like his only destination was his next step,

Instead, I took one slow step forward and then another, intuitively feeling the significance in each choice to lift, extend, then lower a foot.

I couldn’t fathom it then, standing there suspended by his gaze, but I would come to learn that Wilson Moon didn’t experience time the way most people do, or few other things for that matter. He never rushed or fiddled nervously or found a length of silence between two people an awkward vessel to fill with chatter. He rarely looked to the future, and to the past even less, but gathered up the current moment in both hands to admire its particulars, with no apology and no sense it should be otherwise. I couldn’t know any of this as I stood stock-still on Main Street, but I would come to learn the wisdom of his ways and, in time, apply that wisdom when I needed it most.

But I came to understand that she, like I, like women throughout the ages, knew the value of employing silence as a guard dog to her truth. By showing on the surface only a small fraction of her interior, a woman gave men less to plunder.

When the sun topped the ridge and unleashed its full warmth and brightness, I tilted my chin upward to face it. In the steady rise of morning, I recognized that I had been given another day. Tomorrow, perhaps, I would be given yet another.

So I kept on, day by day, and gradually I began to relax, yielding my dread to some level of trust. Comfort certainly did not arrive all at once, and, often, just as I glimpsed it, a noise or another storm would frighten me and set me back. But I soon realized that even more important than planting seeds or digging the latrine or establishing my routine of daily living, I needed to quiet my mind. Worry and fear would not change the outcome of my situation or my fate. Horizon might not be home, but I found a way to stay.

The unforeseen ripple effects of an honest act do not make the choice less truthful. All one can do, I had learned from Wil, is to meet those ripples—as unimaginable or horrific or beautiful or desperate as they may be—with the best you had.

“Whatever you’re still not telling me,” she went on, “that’s your choice. But let me say two things. One, I know you are so tough, saving your trees and running this farm and working so hard and wandering about and every other damn thing you do all by yourself. But carrying your sorrows all alone isn’t strength, V. It’s punishment, plain and simple. Whatever happened to you, you’ve got to stop blaming yourself.”

I sat down in the cool darkness cast by the pines. Reaching to my sides, I scooped two handfuls: black dirt, pine needles, pebbles, twigs, leaves, one tiny snail shell, one white downy feather. I looked around me at the birth and growth and death piled atop one another, at the open bellies of downed trees feeding new sprouts, all the life pushing through every crook and crevice and possibility for light. It was an ancient intelligence far too rich and complex to fully grasp but exactly what I needed to remind myself that it is in these layers of time that everything becomes itself. Yes, Zelda was right that I, like my orchard, had been resilient in new soil, uprooted by circumstance yet able to get on with things anyway. But I had also faltered and fallen, lost my resolve, and curled into fear more times than I could count. Strength, I had learned, was like this littered forest floor, built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.

I decided then that this was what I would reply to Inga Tate, and what I would tell my son if I was ever fortunate enough to know him: that I had lived my life willing to face what came to me, and that I’d always tried to do the next right thing. I would explain that what I had learned most about becoming is that it takes time. I would say I had tried, as Wil taught me, to go as a river, but it had taken me a long while to understand what that meant. Flowing forward against obstacle was not my whole story. For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself. I had been shaped by my kindred—my lost family and lost love; my found friendships, though few; my trees that kept on living and every tree that gave me shelter; every creature I met along the way, every raindrop and snowflake choosing my shoulder, and every breeze that shifted the air; every winding path beneath my feet, every place I laid my hands and head, and every creek like the one before me, rolling off the hillside, gaining strength in gravity, spinning through the next eddy, pushing around the next bend, taking and giving in quiet agreement with every living thing.