Ageless
Rivers are ageless things—
like Lazarus they turn
from silty denouement
into a newborn spring;
curious streams keep their
dependents evergreen,
as shallow power from
white water angst smolders
into sapphire
equanimity.
Part of what makes rivers beautiful is that they are ageless things. Not in the sense that time doesn't change them—it certainly does—but that even as time does, they hold onto all phases of their life. Twenty million violent years have given the Mississippi a mighty delta, one whose silty majesty inspires cultures and marks borders, yet somewhere upstream angsty rapids still punish, curious streams still wander, and an innocent spring still yawns. Time has changed the Mississippi, but taken nothing from it. In maturity, it's still everything it ever was, and does everything it ever has. Still a spring, still a stream, still a rapid; still trickling, still flowing, still roaring. In their unique brand of immortality, rivers are young and old, naive and wise, pitiful and powerful; they both beg for life and give it, both defer to the Earth and carve it. Their growth is truly cumulative. They are complete. Unlike people. For we mature in the opposite fashion to rivers: we grow out of one phase and into the next. We shed the skin of childhood. We quench the fire of adolescence. With grim finality, we retire into old age. When we go somewhere new, we don’t take all of ourselves with us. This is not a good thing, for every phase of life offers us skills we must hold onto if we are to contend well. People think that laughter and play belong to children, but they are mistaken. The buoyant arts are not for children who know only sunshine, safe in the garden of innocence—the buoyant arts are for us, the people upon whom life does not always smile. Some days, and for perhaps some years, life will try to sink us like a dinghy in a hurricane. It is for these times we need laughter and play. The goal of childhood is not to laugh and play and never do so again, but to laugh and play with such intensity that somewhere upstream our spring trickles forever. And so it is with adolescence and adulthood: we do not learn to burn in adolescence to finish life encased in ice, but to smolder with intent; we do not learn love, sacrifice, and magnanimity in adulthood to die cheap, but to nourish like the Mississippi delta.