A shower of rain
As part of the inquiry with the Sentient River group, I took the train from Bath down to Cornwall to stay with Dave at his house overlooking the Fowey Estuary. Our plan was to make a pilgrimage and offer ceremony at several points where River runs wild higher on the moors. Appreciations to Dave for his hospitality and for his part in this little adventure. The story illlustrates one of the many — often unexpected — ways in which the world responds to our invocation
We left Dave’s car at the National Trust car park by the bridge at Raspryn and walked upstream. The path follows River through grassland with many magnificent old trees – mainly oaks. After a bit less than a mile, we came to a wooden kissgate, where we offered thanks and gratitude, borrowing the Lakota prayer, All my Relations, and entered the ceremony space.
River winds between natural banks, running high and fast, but still quite a way from flooding beyond these bounds. We walked quietly, not chatting now, and stopped several times to watch the flow – in some places smooth and swift, in others marked by standing waves, overfalls, back eddies – patterns that are always changing and always the same. River’s voices are very different one stretch to another: the shallows swirl and burble, the quieter languid reaches are smooth, catlike, purring.
As we watched the water rushing past, we both found it drew us into a more open quality of consciousness — in particular where the stream rushed past behind the overhanging branches, so that two patterns overlay each other.
After maybe a mile overall we reached Dave’s spot at a big bend in River where he has been sitting and swimming these last months. He showed me how the water level had overwhelmed the shallows and the eyot in the middle of River, almost completely covering the little beach where he usually sits, so we stood on the bank, on a little peninsula between the flooded beach and a small tributary.
We had agreed we would do ceremony but had not talked about what form it might take. I think I started by saying ‘You should introduce me’, at which Dave took my hand – I remember the feel of his hand in mine, large, strong, companionable – and introduced me to River as brother. We stood holding hands facing downstream and sang several rounds of The River She is Flowing. Dave made his offering of water he had collected from the little shrine he has built by the stream on his land, scattering it in a wide arc over the surface. I followed, standing on the edge of the bank, introducing myself with my given, Medicine and Sacred Names. I called out that I brought greetings from the Rivers Frome and Avon, and from By Brook. I offered the water I had brought from a similar flooded beach on the By Brook. I asked for teaching and poured the water from my bottle into River, paying close attention to the steady stream. Just as I just finished, I hear Dave say, “We have brought on the rain”, and sure enough, on this overclouded but quite dry day, a tiny rain shower moved across River surface from the far bank. It lasts less than ten seconds, then just as suddenly it was gone. It was one of those movements of the world that would be so easy to overlook, and yet felt unmistakably a response to our little ceremony.
As Freya remarked in response to our story, ‘The ten second shower story is just glorious – what could be lovelier! There is so much opportunity for love and joy in this world that we callow moderns never even dream of!’ As she writes in her second post on ontopoetics:
To experience for ourselves the intimately apposite poetic responsiveness of place or landscape to our communicative overtures, of creek or river or mountain to our pilgrimage, is to be shifted on our metaphysical moorings. It is to feel graced, even loved, by world.