‘Seeing the nature’
We also notice that once people had become more comfortable with spending time with River, they become more able to drop into a more direct relationship. They become utterly absorbed in what they see and hear, the sense of a boundary between self and other drops away. Different groups used a variety of metaphors for this experience, ‘slipping under the psychic skin of the world’, ‘lifting the veil’. We see parallels here with the ‘kensho’ or ‘sartori’ experience of Ch’an and Zen Buddhist practice, when self concerns drop away and ‘there was just an openness to that which lies before the senses’ and the world appears ‘clean-clear, precise, within a lucidity of awareness that does not judge’.[i] This is not an experience that can be approached intentionally, but one that may emerge spontaneously with sufficient practice.
Dave was part of the first Living Waters inquiry and the later Sentient Rivers group. He lives on the banks of the tidal River Fowey in Cornwall and meditates each morning in a hut by the foreshore. As part of his practice, he made a pilgrimage to the spectacular Golitha Falls, where the River drops from Bodmin Moor to the coastal plain.
I’m sitting by River above Golitha falls. It's a very, very dramatic section of river, almost operatic. There is quite a smooth slow stretch that might lead you to think 'Oh, nice little river'. Then goes into a second act of rapids; and then the finale is the Falls—the Fowey drops 300 feet in the space of a half a mile. I went there with the intention of going into presence of the water, and lots, lots of things happened. I sat there a long time, preoccupied with the physicality of the water. In the Fowey there are these torrents, and in the torrents, you get these remarkable forms, and they keep reforming. There are slack zones between the white-water currents where the water swirls round boulders and in whose lee a slack zone forms where the bubbles hover in retrograde motion, dancing in jerky gyres. It seems strange that the water flows backwards between vee-shaped foaming vortex gambolling so forcefully. In the slack water by the bank rippling wave trains jostle into tiny whirlpools and dance off the bank in interference patterns reflecting a quilt of sky-blue surface and the ochres of the granite sand below.
The slack water is inducing daydreams. I am mesmerized by the different forms of the river; I keep slipping off into sleepy borderlands of awareness. But when I look at the torrent I’m enlivened. The constancy of the contours amazes me: a geography of valleys and rolling hills of moving water, shaping and breaking apart more rapidly than I can tell. Living bodies are like this, continually re-materialising and re-forming. We are organic force fields, stuff flows through us, and we look the same, but we're not.
I walk downstream to a place by the big torrent above the deepest falls. I’m in a chasm whose wall to the South is a cliff festooned with ferns. I sit and after a while I’m filled with the torrent’s thunder. It rumbles in my bones. The sensation comes and goes like a reverberating mantra. I try to feel whether it's coming through the rock. It isn't, it’s the river’s deep infrasonic drumming. The air is shaking, and I see how the torrent creates a wind that ruffles the ferns. My mind is drawn to one wave form after the other as the water sculpts itself over the rocks, light suddenly erupting in the foam bursting over stone, the dark oily water flowering into brightness. A miniature waterfall slides smoothly over a flat rock and shapes the ceiling of a prism-shaped space of light and air.
At first the elemental water absorbs all my vision. But for moments I feel and sense this torrent as a whole system, a oneness. This place is truly sacred, a place to worship water and air – a Cornish cloud-forest, ferns everywhere, some growing on and in the trees, the trees themselves furry with moss, their canopy stretching for light above the gorge, still in leaf though the ground is black and muddy, the granite treacherous and slippery with fallen leaves. I felt myself like an eel slithering over the wet granite to find my perch in the green booming temple of the falls.
When I think back over the experience, I'm drawn back into the dream time, reminded of this encounter. It was like a pilgrimage: the departure, the journey, the arrival, the ritual, the prayers, and the return. Go and sit, pay attention. Meet the river. It was a challenging journey, quite tricky getting to that place, which is a sacred temple of air and water. And then, I didn't realise but now I'm returned, I've returned with something. It'll fade, but I'm so glad to offer it.
[i] Crook, J. H. (2019). Circling Birds. Hove, UK: Redware Research Ltd, p.310.