Go as a River

by Shelley Read

Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.

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.

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,

As the thin clouds parted and the water sparkled with sunlight, I wondered at the sense of it all—this journey I have called my life, so like this drowned river that keeps being a river even as it is forced to be a lake, moving forward against obstacle and dam, continuing to flow with all it has gathered because it knows no other way.