Offering the Waters
To all those who need it, now and always, the river offers itself for healing.
Welcome to The Living World, where I explore the wisdom in the web of life that connects us all. I am driven by visions of truly regenerative futures and committed to the transformations in consciousness and culture that are required to get us there. I write each essay to help me see the world through a lens of curiosity, wonder, love, and humility at what this world of life makes possible
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Since the turning of the year, I’ve felt a deep and daily call from the river here where I live. This river is ancient and relatively well protected as most of its body moves through large wildlife reserves. The river, in its quiet wisdom, calls me to its banks, to be still, to listen, to remember, to reconnect.
This month in The Art of Regenerative Living, the winter wisdom council I am hosting, is focused on remembrance and this last week in particular was focused on remembrance of the lands on which we live. As I get quiet and listen to the river, I have been feeling deep connection to the memories of the land here, the memories of the water. The Ais people, the original people of this land, were river people. They knew the rhythms of the waters, their tides, their seasons, their gifts. Where this river meets the lagoon forms a vast and biodiverse estuary brimming with life—sacred waters that hold ancient memories and deep, present wisdom.
For a week now as the devastating fires have been tearing through Los Angeles, I have been coming to the river. These fires, apocalyptic in scale, are hard to fathom, even harder to hold. They illuminate the untenable nature of the way we humans have constructed our reality, the fragility of the systems we’ve come to rely upon, and the grief of what is being destroyed.
Collapse comes in many forms. It takes the shape of fire, of flood, of soil that can no longer bear life. It also takes the quieter shape of systems unraveling, of lives displaced, of despair that creeps into the corners of our days. And yet—life continues. Water flows. Seeds germinate. We find ways to live.
Everything the Earth needs to restore balance already exists. The problem lies in distribution. This truth applies not only to our waters but to all the elements of life’s balance—where carbon resides in the biosphere and the atmosphere, how nutrients cycle through soil and sea, and certainly how money flows within human economies. It’s not about whether there is enough, but where things are distributed. If we can find ways to redistribute these resources—aligning them with the patterns and needs of life itself—that is how we find a way forward. The Earth’s systems, when honored and supported, already know how to heal, replenish, and sustain life.
If we were to build on and live with and care for the places where we live in a way that recognized and worked with their core ecological realities, the world would be a much safer place. Fire, of course, happens in places where fires need to burn for ecosystem health. Floods flow where water needs to go, often reclaiming wetlands that have been developed over. Soil can be rebuilt, remediated, and made fertile again. The Earth knows how to heal herself. The question, as always, is the degree to which we as humans will participate in that healing, to know and take our place.
Writing these words, I return, as I often do, to my mother’s definition of humility:
To know your place and take it.
Here, by the river, I am reminded of life’s resilience. The waters carry their own wisdom: they teach us that even after fire, rains will come. That the flow will find a way, carving new paths when the old ones are blocked. That collapse can be fertile ground for something new.
To those in the heat of fire, in the depths of heartbreak, I offer these waters as a balm. These waters, flowing through the river, the estuary, the lagoon, through the inlet where the children here learn to swim, and into the ocean, are part of the same great cycle that nourishes the rains in California and the springs in the mountains. All waters are one.
May these experiences—the fires, the waters, the ache and the renewal—point us toward ways of living that affirm life. Ways that hold space for grief and transformation, ways that allow us to live within the boundaries of this living planet. May they remind us that to truly live is to be in relationship: with water, fire, soil, seed, and each other.
Collapse may be all around us, but it also teaches us what matters most. It is a mirror and a teacher, showing us what we need to let go of and what we must carry forward. And it reminds us, too, that life finds a way. Even now, water flows. Seeds germinate. People care for one another. Life continues.
The seed has no idea
if it will ever split open the soil.
The river doesn’t stop to ask
if the mountain will move for it.
And yet—
life insists.
It flows. It roots.
It continues.
Let us honor this living world as it transforms.
Let us bear witness, and let us be part of the regeneration.