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Do you remember the little puffer fish creating mandalas at the bottom of the Sea of Japan?
Or the mile -long mural made of war debris by artists in Damascus, Syria? Or the engine that runs on urine, invented by a group of Nigerian teenage girls? Or the people painstakingly unwrapping yards of fishing line, disentangling a dolphin? Or the intense Twitter stream between a young Black mother and a white racist teenager that ended with his apologizing and her comforting him over the recent death of his mother?
These beautiful stories come to us through the Internet, but the Net just spreads them. They would be happening anyway. The world is a river of creativity. Creative energy is all around us. That’s what stars do. That’s what life is.
What does this mean for you and me? It means we don’t have to dig our own river. The river is there and we are part of it. We just have to add our own drop of creation to the flow.
What is your contribution to the river? For me, the best way to find out is to stop thinking so much and just let things come. They will come if you don’t push them away. Ideas are like fish swimming around us. We just have to pay attention to them as they move, and we’ll have some ideas to play with. We don’t have to swallow them, just observe them and let them touch us.
In that way, we can each add our life to the river of life. You might find that swimming or floating, drinking from or watching the river is much less stressful and more enjoyable than trying to dam up or redirect the river. At least I’m finding that true. You might have noticed that I didn’t think much about this piece. I still like the way it came out. Hope you do, too.
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Or as Diane di Prima wrote in Revolutionary Letter #2, in 1971, embracing a Vietnamese perspective during the war there:
The value of an individual life a credo they taught us
to instil fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’
a fog in our eyes, we are
endless as the sea, not separate, we die
a million times each day, we are born
a million times, each breath life and death
get up , put your shoes on, get
started, someone will finish
Tribe
an organism, one flesh, breathing joy as the stars
breathe destiny down on us, get
going, join hands, see to business, thousands of sons
will see to it when you fail, you will grow
a thousand times in the bellies of your sisters…
Today I went down to my fish wheel to harvest some salmon. At the bottom of the box was a small juvenile salmon which was caught while migrating to the sea, not like the rest of the adults on their way to their spawning grounds. I took the little fish and dug a little spot for it to rest on the side of the river until it was ready to continue on its way to the sea to grow to adulthood and maybe return to spawn in another four years. Chances are that it will become a meal for something out there before that happens, but I saw value in its seemingly insignificant life and did something to preserve it.
Think of how much more valuable each human being is in this world. Think of our ability to have a positive influence in our interactions with people, even the seemingly insignificant ones. That’s part of enjoying the journey.