{"id":193684,"date":"2021-09-13T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2021-09-13T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=193684"},"modified":"2021-08-30T04:41:27","modified_gmt":"2021-08-30T03:41:27","slug":"an-illustrated-love-letter-to-rivers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/09\/an-illustrated-love-letter-to-rivers\/","title":{"rendered":"An Illustrated Love Letter to Rivers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A painted landscape of fact and feeling along the flow of existence.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today,\u201d Olivia Laing wrote in her stunning meditation on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers<\/a> after she walked the River Ouse from source to sea \u2014 the River Ouse, in which Virginia Woolf slipped out of the mystery of life, having once observed that \u201cthe past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Rivers are the crucible of human civilization, pulsating with the might and mystery of water<\/a>, their serpentine paths encoded with the precision of pi<\/a>, their ceaseless flow encoded in our greatest poems<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cTime is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river,\u201d Borges wrote in his timeless refutation of time<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But what is a river?<\/p>\n

That is what Lithuanian illustrator and storyteller Monika Vaicenavi\u010dien\u0117<\/a> contemplates in What Is a River?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 part prose poem and part encyclopedia, exploring the many things a river is and can be, ecologically and existentially.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The story begins on the banks of a river, with a little girl picking flowers \u2014 \u201cevery flower has a meaning\u201d \u2014 and watching her grandmother sew. What unfolds is framed as the grandmother\u2019s answer to the girl\u2019s question of what a river is:<\/p>\n

A river is a thread.
\nIt embroiders our wold with beautiful patterns.
\nIt connects people and places, past and present.
\nIt stitches stories together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The narrative weaves in the encyclopedic \u2014 geology and history, curious statistics about famous rivers \u2014 but fact and feeling remain entwined in the poetic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A river is a journey.<\/p>\n

A bubbling spring, a gap in a glacier, a boggy marsh, a silent lake \u2014 a river can begin anywhere.<\/p>\n

A river travels to many places: prairies and cities, dense forests and lush meadows, steppes and tundra, mountains and valleys. It travels through heat and cold. It leaps from dizzying heights, cascading down as a waterfall. It slinks lazily through marshes. Suddenly, it twists, then meanders. It creeps underground. It carves canyons out of mountains, reducing rock to sediment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We see the river as home, called to imagine how many human lives the Nile touches in a single day along its 4,100-mile meander across Africa, or the Danube across the ten countries it traverses in Europe (my own native Bulgaria among them).<\/p>\n

We see the river as a habitat, to creatures as various as the hippo and the heron, the dragonfly and the platypus.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We see the river as a meeting-place, a muse, a name-source of countries and people, a sensory landscape, an emissary of deep time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Myth and fact converge into a larger reflection on the ceaseless flow of existence, linking the Ancient Greek myth of Oceanus \u2014 the great river encircling the Earth, from which the word ocean<\/em> derives \u2014 with the ecological reality of Earth\u2019s immense, interconnected, ancient system of water circulating through the atmosphere and pulsating through the biosphere.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Complement What Is a River?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Italian artist Alessandro Sanna\u2019s watercolor serenade The River<\/em><\/a>, then revisit poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan on the mountain as a lens on the meaning of life<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books<\/a>; photographs by Maria Popova<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired UK and<\/em> The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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