Whirlpools
On watching River flow
River is flowing, flowing on and on, relentlessly and incessantly. A self-maintaining moving pattern of rippling and ruffling, of cresting and creasing. Where does River come from and where does River end? River ends at the beginning and begins at the end.
Whirlpools travel down with the stream, distinct points in the pattern. Some spin cleanly and strongly, opening a vortex in the water; others are messier and shallower, mere surface disturbance. They draw in bits and pieces of debris, spin them around and let them go. Whirlpools pass me by, busily with their spinning and travelling. Now there is a whole gang of them coming down together, travelling along the edge of an upwelling.
I don’t often see whirlpools form – they mostly do that privately upstream when something in River spins them into being – but I watch them pass and I watch them die. They dissipate, disperse. When their energy goes, they are simply no longer there. Not a trace. Fading back into the River stream.
You and I are whirlpools in the Great River of Life, disturbances in the fabric of the cosmos. We begin in the dark, hidden in mystery. We spin around busily for a while, drawing in bits and pieces as we go along, creating our own little self-important world, carried along by the Great River. And then, like a whirlpool, merge back to the flow. Whirlpools don’t struggle to stay alive. When they’ve done their thing, they just fade away.
We too fade away. When we have had our turn, our little time of beauty, we are once again back in the River of Life. Where we always have been.1
I am borrowing here from Thomas Berry who said, in answer to a question as to where he would be when he ‘passed on’, “I’ll be where I’ve always been. Right here in the universe”. His biographers continue, noting that this response mirrored what he had written earlier, ‘we are as old as the universe and as big as the universe. This is our great self. We survive in our great self.’ Tucker, M. E., Grim, J., & Angyal, A. (2019). Thomas Berry: A biography. Columbia University Press, p. 174.
Hi Peter, I love the post, and love this embodied practice that Dewey (or was it Mead) called 'naturalistic metaphysics' - finding out about the way the world works through being in it. It is beautifully expressed and I also love the fact I know the bend in the river where you were - where indeed the River Frome (where I live) meets the River Avon (where you live) :-)
I landed on the centrality of ripples and rippling in my recent writing on process complexity (see The Dao of Complexity, De Gruyter, 2024). Process complexity is "a view of complexity that moves us from an image of concretely objective ‘things which interact’ towards an image of entities that are more akin to ripples on a river. It also emphasises the processual nature of the complex world, and in addition includes aspects of the world that are not localised, such as wind or mood."
I continue: "Ripples provide a great metaphor for a rethink. Ripples have form and a certain degree of independence, but they indivisibly interact with other ripples, currents, vortices and anything else present. Ripples are paradoxically both separate and not separate; they are identifiable and yet ever-changing....By introducing a processual view, we understand ‘things’ as interpenetrating patterns, patterns which may be fleeting or persistent. In so doing, we uncover a more nuanced and inclusive perspective of the complex world.... Ripples impact each other, may merge, may separate again, and may disappear."
The central concept is that process is primary. Processes create ‘forms’, which may, for a time, be ‘substantial’ – have substance; that time period may be long or short. But any substantial forms are as a result of, are secondary to, processes.
So I love it - and I like the idea of being a vortex - potent for a while and then returning to the mix.. A quote from the Upanishads: "[Rivers] arise from the sea and flow into the sea. [And] these rivers, while they are in the sea, do not know: 'I am this river' or 'I am that river."