The Elders Speak:
On Rivers
A river does not just happen; it has a beginning and and end. Its story is written in rich earth, in ice, and in water-carved stone, and its story as the lifeblood of the land is filled with colour, music and thunder.
Andy Russell, The Life of a River
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself - for it is from the soil, both from its depth and from its surface, that a river has its beginning.
Laura Gilpin, The Rio Grande
The trees reflected in the river -- they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land.
Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers
Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part.
Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley
Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning.
Richard Bangs, River Gods
You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
Heraclitus of Ephesus
A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water...has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.
Roderick Haig-Brown
Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning.
Richard Bangs, River Gods
Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
A. A. Milne, Pooh's Little Instruction Book
A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river, and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost.
Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire.
Tim Palmer, Lifelines
The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.
Chief Seattle
If you grew up in the country, chances are you have fond memories of lazy days down by a river, creek or pond.
Darlene Donaldson, The River
A brook or a river is flowing water, living water, and it talks of time, particularly in March. The brooks are talking now, On warm afternoon they are even singing....chattering now about snow melt on the hillsides and in the deep woods.
Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons
The River itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the River; in its end, it is no longer the River. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?
T. S. Eliot
We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul.
Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet.
Jeff Rennicke, River Days: Travels on Western Rivers, A Collection of Essays
For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river.
Henry Van Dyke
It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went.
Henry David Thoreau
Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part.
Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley
Rivers are exquisite in their abilities to nurture life, sublime in functioning detail, impressive in contributions of global significance.
Tim Palmer, Lifelines
The flowing waters carry the image of the peach blossoms far, far away:
There is an earth, there is a heaven, unknown to men.
Ritaihaku
I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.
Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
...the river valley is a magic music box. To those who would observe, the pattern of color and movement paint a picture that is a masterwork resulting from millions of years of nature's efforts, yet dynamic and ephemeral.
Tom Waters, The Streams and Rivers of Minnesota
The face of the river, in time, became a wonderful book.... And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
...the chuckle of running water and the whisper of a breeze in the tall trees...
Sigurd F. Olson, The Listening Point
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion
William Wordsworth, Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
Barry Lopez
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. ...
I am haunted by waters.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
I have recently added many of my lifetime collection of photographs and art works to an on-line shop where you can purchase notecards, posters, and greeting cards, etc. of my best images.
|
|
