Woman, River, Otter

This story seems to me to recount an experience of enchantment of the kind Patrick Curry describes,¹ and maybe can also be seen as an ontopoetic response of the world responding to my call. Anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro suggests that we engage in ceremony with the more than human world, other creatures can also be drawn in.² And as Freya Mathews puts it, ‘as soon as we start to observe the protocols again – by engaging in ceremonial forms of exchange with the wider community of persons, for example – those persons immediately respond, by turning up at our rituals or offering other “signs” of their attention’.³

Winter trees near the River

“ ’Scuse me!”

I turn to see a woman leaning out of the window of a white pick-up truck.

“You know this is private land!” The voice is shrill, but it was not clear whether this was a statement, a question, or an accusation.

“I found a stile over there,” I call back. “I’m not doing any harm”.

She closes her window and drives off.

It is a bright, frosty mid-winter morning. I had found a way down from the bridge over this lovely River in rural North Wales by climbing over that style into rough pastureland. I am delighted to find this path and walk along the river bank, watching the patterns in the water – where it is still, deep, and dark; where it flows rapidly and brightly; how the brisk stream carves through and so creates the landscape. As I walk, I chant, a heartbeat rhythm that serves both to quieten my busy mind and to ‘sing-up’ River – taking ‘chanting’ in its fullest sense as ‘enchanting’, to invoke a sentient presence.⁴ From time to time I slip under the veil of the everyday world to momentarily experience myself as intimately part of a reality wider and deeper than my own, as if drawn into the psyche of the place. So when I turn to retrace my steps, I am feeling happy and content.

Just by the bridge, where River flows from under the stone arches, is a pool of dark water. Deep below the surface, I imagine, lies rich, dark mud, sediment brought down from the hills and dropped where the water stills. The surface appears both profoundly dark and shining bright, a mirror to the reflections of skeletal trees and the clouds drifting across the morning sky.

A clear line defines the lower edge of the pool. An overturning of water, a delicate curve, which then breaks into shallow rapids, dancing downstream, rattling over a gravel bed, transparent, luminous… Then stilled again in another dark pool.

I pause my walk, my eye drawn from the mirror pool to the tumbling rapids and back again, then caught as what seems like a wave emerges on the surface of the pool where no wave should be, a sparkling uplift of water. This supposed wave subsides, then reappears a few yards distance, subsides again, and finally emerges as Otter, gliding effortlessly out onto the far bank, water pouring from kis glistening coat.

I watch. Am I am seen? Of course I am! Otter looks at me with fierce intensity, searches this way and that, as if wondering how to retreat, then slides back into the pool and surfs down the rapids within feet of where I am standing, long slender body clearly visible just below the surface… and vanishes.

I am thrilled: how unexpected is this? How rare is it to see the whole body of Otter, rather than just a glimpse, maybe a head, or just a splash. I am grateful for this gift from River, wondering whether my chanting has actually ‘sung up’ Otter, or if ki was just ottering about kis own business.

“‘Scuse me…”

The shrill challenge cuts through my reverie, leaves me jangled, my heart racing, my mind turning over what I might have said to the woman in the pickup. Maybe I could have said, “Yes, this is private land, private to River, to Otter, to many other beings living here”. Probably best to just say, “You are so fortunate to live in such a beautiful place”.

I don’t say any of these but climb back over the stile and onto the road with an irritated churning in my stomach, feeling that something had been taken away from me: the mysterious magic of the morning had gone, as if it had never been.

But the woman is really upset. The following morning, after some hesitation, I choose to follow the same path, over the stile and along the River bank. I am feeling a little anxious: she had not told me directly not to walk here, but that was the implication of her challenge. Sure enough, as I retrace my steps, she comes stomping across the field from the farm on the opposite bank. It is quite a long walk, across a couple of fields, and something of her gait tells me she is very cross. She catches up with me almost exactly at the spot where I had seen Otter the previous day, and shouts across the water, “I told you yesterday this was private land!” We have a bit of a fruitless argy-bargy over the clatter of the stream until I realize this is just a waste of energy – hers and mine – and simply say, “I am sorry I have upset you,” climb back over the stile, and make my way up the road to breakfast.

I am silenced. But, curiously, it seems that River had been silenced too.

Later, I find myself wondering further about this experience. I described Otter ‘wondering how to retreat’. But the obvious way for Otter to retreat would be to slip back into the deep pool and swim away under water. What would have drawn Otter to surf down the shallow waters of the rapid within a few feet of where I was standing? So maybe (and how could one possibly know?) Otter was in some way showing off, offering kis presence to me, speaking to me in the only way available, through physical gestures. Maybe Otter was saying something like, ‘Hey, this is me, and River and I are inseparable’. Maybe, dare I suppose, this was an offer of some kind of kinship.

My second reflection is on my closing statement, ‘River had been silenced too’. What do I mean, and what evidence might I muster to justify this? Since (in my world) River is a living, sentient being, ki is unlikely to reveal herself in the presence of those who claim ownership, who shout arguments across her flow, who are disrespectful. In my walking and chanting along the banks, River seemed open to my presence, as if (dare I say again) naïve, less impacted by the control of River by modern humans. Perhaps, like me, River and Otter and living beings of all kinds can only fully reveal their sentience in convivial relationship.

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1. Patrick Curry The Experience of Enchantment and the Sense of Wonder

2. See Harvey, G. (2017). Animism: Respecting the living world (Second ed.). Hurst and Company, p.98-101; Also Reason, P. (2023). Extending Co-operative Inquiry Beyond the Human: Ontopoetic inquiry with Rivers. Action Research.

3. Mathews, F. (2017). “Come with Old Khayyam and Leave the Wise to Talk”. Worldviews: Global Regions, Culture, Ecology, 21(3), 218-234.

4. Freya Mathews develops this understanding of enchantment in the introduction to For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003.