Robert Macfarlane

We are all water bodies. We are made so massively of water, our bones, our brain, our lungs, our blood, they all flow, even though we think of them as static. And that begins to tell us something about how life is lived, not as a unit or a substance, but as a process and a flow.

Narration

Nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s newest book Is a River Alive? is an inquiry into the animacy of the waters that run around our world and through our lives. It’s a book that changed the course of Robert’s life, and this conversation changed mine, as well. I’m Willow Defebaugh, and this is The Nature Of. Each week, we explore the nature of our world through conversations that help us reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the Earth. This week, we’re looking at the nature of rivers with Robert Macfarlane. 

Willow Defebaugh

Well, I have to tell you, I read this book in three nights and the third night, not to live too much up to my namesake, but I wept pretty much the entire way through. And we’re gonna get into all of it. But as a starting place, I’m curious what inspired you to traverse the animacy of rivers? What led you to this question of is a river alive?

Robert

Wow. Well, uh, I’ll just start by saying that to me, there’s something beautiful about the perpetuation of the water cycle that comes from crying as a response to, to reading this book. So I am, I’m happy that water begat water and I’m very moved that you were moved. Thank you for telling me that. 

Where did it begin? There is no one beginning to a book as there is no one beginning to a river. They have their springs and they have their sources and they have watersheds as well, which are vast and complex and eventually unmappable. But I suppose I grew up as a river lover. I grew up fishing with my father and my grandfather on Scottish rivers. I grew up climbing, and mountains and rivers live in this very old conversation with one another. So there’s a sort of deep history, deep life history. And then I think probably it was the fascination that began to grip me with this little spring or stream, a nameless spring or stream who rises near my house in this wood called Nine Wells Wood because there are nine springs there. And the realization of the magic of that place, the everyday modest magic of that place, combined with its fragility and indeed its increasing death, its dying, I think could be another spring.

Willow

You mentioned in the book that you grew up on logic and rationalism, and there’s a certain extent to which that had to be suspended or unlearned in order to embark on this journey. What are some watershed moments in that process of unlearning?

Robert

Well, I had a really fascinating conversation with Elif Shafak, who’s an extraordinary Turkish novelist who’s been living in Britain for many years now, and can’t return to Turkey because of her politics, because of her literature, and she published a novel called There are Rivers in the Sky just a few months before Is a River Alive? came out. And so we have found ourselves having a lot to talk about, and Elif picked out that line. She said, “You were raised on a diet of rationalism.” And she said, “But I was raised on a diet of irrationalism,” and she told me this amazing story about being raised by her grandmother, who told her stories for whom water would speak, for whom things were animate. And I started to think again about my idea that I was raised within a rational household. And I was, because my father’s a doctor, my mother worked in a hospital clinic, and I grew up within a liberal tradition, which we would probably call the enlightenment. Right? It’s rationalism, it’s measurability.

But I also, I then realized, did grow up in an irrational world because I climbed. When you go into the upper world of mountains, suddenly you are confronted with irrationalism. I’ve seen my own phantom projected onto a body of moving swirling mist with four circular parahelia or rainbows emanating from it. It’s what’s called a Brocken Specter, and it is explicable in physics, but when you meet it, you are in the presence of otherworldly eeriness. Ice, water, rock, time, seasons: They all behave irrationally in the upper world. So I’ve realized that, as in most of us, it’s a dual stream, right? There’s a rational and there’s an irrational stream, and there’s an intellectual version of that, which is the tradition that we call the enlightenment.

But there is another intellectual tradition within the Western tradition, which we might call the tradition not of enlightenment but of enlivenment. So I think actually that the enlivenment and the enlightenment both educated me; and perhaps that’s what’s made this journey back into the life and the liveliness of water a little easier than it might have been.

Willow

Speaking of this enlivenment, I think it’s important to invoke what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the grammar of animacy here, in talking about what we mean when we say alive. So, how has shifting your language, specifically in relationship to how we think about and talk about rivers, expanded your consciousness? What are some examples? You mentioned earlier, referring to a river as who as opposed to which.

Robert

I do see language as sometimes a prison. And always a prism. It is what we see through, and sometimes it is what traps us. And we can say that grammar is different to lexus. Grammar is the deep structure of thought, really, because we do much of our thinking in language, though not all of it. 

And so what Robin so brilliantly and consequentially calls the grammar of animacy is a recognition that grammar can record and enforce a de-animation. We it in English, typically, the living world. We which the living world, we that the living world. And that is part of a grammar of inanimacy. But Robin makes the point that in Potawatomi, for example, the nation language of which she’s a citizen, the word bay, B-A-Y is a verb. In English, it obviously means a kind of body of water and inlet, but it’s a noun. It’s definitely a noun. And in English, “river” is a noun. And that came to seem to me absolutely crazy. I was like, what could be more of a verb than a river? And so in one sense, the whole book is about what it means to turn river from noun into verb, and what that shift does to worldview, to law, to neighborliness, to ethics, to imagination, and to storytelling. I don’t know. To you, Willow, river’s always been a verb, maybe?

Willow

I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about it not being a verb, but I also, when you point out the fact that it is traditionally a noun, it’s, I feel the prison of what you’re talking about in terms of language, and rivers are something that cut through every, any kind of prison. I mean, I love that you point out at one moment in the book that, you know, even the hardest stone in the world, you would need a river to really cut through it. Not a diamond saw.

Robert

And rivers, you know, there’s an imagined dialogue, I think somewhere in the book, where Wayne or I say, you know. Uh, river and mountain are both gods, but river is stronger than mountain. And yeah, it’s amazing dynamism and patience. Who are your rivers? I love asking this of people. Who are the rivers you grew up with, Willow, or who flow through your life now? Your memories?

Willow

So I grew up in Michigan, and there’s a stream that ran through my backyard, and there was actually a willow tree that hung over it. And I would go and I would sit by it every morning or every afternoon after school. And it’s so strange, but I only realized about three weeks ago that my last name on my father’s side—I’m part German, and Defenbaugh, Tiefenbach was the original, the root of the name, and it means deep brook or stream.

Robert

What?

Willow

So I’ve been, I’ve been having this sort of year in which rivers have really been speaking to me.

Robert

Whoa. So you’ve been named Defebaugh. Defebaugh comes from a root meaning deep stream?

Willow

Mm-hmm.

Robert

You lucky duck. I wish my name had a river running through it. That’s amazing.

Willow

I feel quite proud of that. I feel honored by it.

Robert

Yeah. And not to know. And suddenly to realize that a river runs through your name and that’s, yeah. That’s a wonderful kind of metonym there, almost for this way that rivers infiltrate us, influence us, often, very subtly, very quietly. Many cultures, many cities, many societies. There is an amnesia or a burial of the river. It is a deep-running stream, but it’s also one that gets covered over and built around and forgotten. And so part of the work of the future, I think, and certainly of course the present, is restory-ing, reloving, relearning another kind of relationship with rivers.

Willow

And letting the rivers run through us, as you so beautifully put it.

Robert

Yeah. They really do, and they do physically, materially. We’ve already touched on the water cycle of crying. We are all water bodies. We are made so massively of water: our bones, our brain, our lungs, our blood, they all flow even though we think of them as static. And that begins to tell us something about how life is lived—not as a unit or a substance, but as a process and a flow. But again, that enlightenment tradition has been one of subject creation where you end with your skin, you are your substance, you are the unit that can then engage in a kind of Newtonian billiard ball interaction with other units. But what happens if we are all rivers?

Willow

In talking about the enlivenment of rivers, we’re not talking about the anthropomorphizing of rivers. We’re not trying to make rivers human in the effort to see them as more alive; but instead, it’s almost a wading into being river.

Robert

Yes.

Willow

Can you speak a little bit more to that distinction?

Robert

Beautifully phrased question. Wading into being river. Yes, I’d love to because I think a lot about it. So the first thing I would say is that anthropomorphism has got a bad name. It’s picked up a bad name. And if ethology in anthropology is a form of almost colonial projection that we’re seeking to make everything human, I do think that anthropomorphism does not have to be a one-channel, single-flow process. That when we recognize that which is human in other, let’s say in a creature, we also recognize that which is creaturely in the human. And at some level, the same, it seems to me, is true of the relationship with the river. That when we recognize something that is human in a river, we also recognize something that is river-y in the human. And that can be, it doesn’t have to be, but it can be the beginning of the breaking down of hard boundaries. 

But I am interested in how we might, to use George Eliot’s phrase, “enlarge the [imagined] range self has to swim in” or to move in. And one way to do that is to think of a river as a person. But by that, not to mean that a person is and must be a human person. A person can be, in this case, a being, a presence, a category of life lived as process. And that it seems to me opens up a shared space in which different ways of being and seeing, different lives can meet and recognize their interdependence, interpenetration, um, interaction in ways that exceed the categorical boundaries we normally live and see by. So yes, to call a river a person is to enlarge the category person rather than to make it a human. 

Willow

And that really flows perfectly into, you know, what is a key tributary of this book, which is the Rights of Nature movement and the work of people like our shared friends, César and the MOTH Collective, who are seeking to reshape the law to grant more protections for the more-than-human world, and that includes rivers.

You summon a number of cornerstone cases in this book. I was wondering if there’s one that springs to mind right now that you might want to share a little bit about.

Robert

Well, there’s so many happening now. I mean, one of the many things to say about the rights of nature, which is an attempt to recognize not to bestow the rights of natural systems, ecosystems, natural entities, living spiritual, physical entities, rivers, forests, mountains, for example, and in particular, rivers have proved the commonest form of novel legal subjectivity with which this young but also very ancient movement has worked. 

So the rights of nature is predominantly a 21st-century political, artistic, philosophical movement, legal movement. But of course, it has its roots in  world views, cosmovisions, ways of seeing and being that are thousands, tens of thousands of years old.

The case that I would, I think it would be good to speak of is the recognition and protection of the Los Cedros Cloud Forest in,  Ecuador. And in 2008, Ecuador became and remains the only nation state to have the rights of nature recognized in its constitution. And in 2021, at a time when this remarkable cloud forest, ultra biodiverse, ultra high endemicity of species, high forest just teaming with life was threatened with absolute destruction by gold and copper mining concessions, those rights of nature embedded in the constitution were used to recognize in a constitutional court case the rights of the forest and its rivers to exist, flourish, and survive. Its rights to respect, its rights to regeneration, and its rights to maintain its natural cycles. 

So, within the context of very anthropocentric Western or global North law, this jaw-dropping judgment came down in 2021. But within the context of this counter tradition, legally, this legal pluralism of the Ecuadorian court system, it gave the judges the basis with which to make this enormously powerful judgment. The mining companies were gone within 10 days. 

There is a kicker to this, which is that it is not a case of happily ever after, I’m sorry to say. And César Rodríguez Garavito, who we’ve alluded to a couple of times already, this brilliant activist field lawyer who both you and I work with, are lucky to work with. And who I traveled to the cloud forest with. He and I collaborated on an op-ed for The New York Times very recently about the assault on the constitution, on Indigenous rights, and on the rights of nature that is currently underway in Ecuador. And it is a real, I’m afraid to say, emergency situation. And the forest and the rivers are once more threatened. 

But so we see there is such a range. We see the power of moral imagination when it takes legal form, we see the expression of that within a court system, and the protection on the ground that philosophical radicalism inaugurates and makes possible. And then we see again, the fragility of moral thinking in the face of power and greed. 

Willow

And you speaking about law as the codification of the moral imagination. That really is something that has shifted so much for me. I grew up in a household with two lawyers for parents, and I could not have been less interested in the law growing up. I felt so, um, prosaic to me. I just, I was really interested in like imaginal spaces, and it’s been so interesting being on this journey and, you know, learning from the rights of nature movement and understanding that law really is, at one point was, someone’s imagination. It is a framework that is imaginal, and I think that opens up so much because when you see something as imaginary, you immediately are transported to being able to see it reimagined, right? As opposed to something that is so fixed. 

Robert

Exactly, yes. The law, I think I say somewhere in Is a River Alive?, the law is a storied thing, and as such it can be re-storied. And that’s so funny you grew up in a legal household and I nearly became a lawyer three times.

Willow

Really?

Robert

To me, the worst kind of lawyer. It was like sort of, you know, city solicitor or corporate law firm, the stuff that would’ve made me very unhappy very quickly. But writing this book and spending five years hanging out with lawyers has been, as for you, a real journey into the law as a power, as a tool, as a possibility. I’ve spent time recently with the British Peruvian lawyer, Monica Feria-Tinta, who was an amicus curiae, a friend of the court on behalf of the forest in the Los Cedros case. Her book, A Barrister for the Earth, is a stunning account of how the law is a condensation of imagination. And as such, shifts—and of course, moral imagination is not always good moral imagination as we would see it. And we see examples of that absolutely everywhere. But it is a storied thing, and it can be re-storied. It is an imagined thing, and it can be re-imagined. And that is what the best of the rights of nature and other kinds of eco-jurisprudential initiatives are doing is trying to re-imagine the fundamentally anthropocentric basis of almost all law.

Willow

The river not taken, you almost being a lawyer, is that, um, is that part of what drew you to the legal aspect of this?

Robert

No, no. In fact, when I began this, I was very nervous of the legal aspect because it seemed as if it would be arid. It would, you know, be fully dehydrated. It’s the dried-up riverbed, and that’s not where I wanted to play. And then for a long time, I thought it was a book almost exclusively about the rights of nature. And then one day, I realized it wasn’t about law and the rights of nature at all. It was about life. It was a book about what is alive and what is dead. What the law, what power, what imagination, what individual communities deem to be alive and what they deem to be dead?

It just feels so powerful at the moment if one looks at the Middle East and one looks in Sudan, one sees just conflict zones again and again, where the life of a group is being de-animated, is being systematically, kind of suppressed in its liveliness so that it becomes a kind of dead matter. Isaac Newton refers to stuff as what he calls brute inanimate matter in a 1692 letter. And I think that we hear in that word brute, we hear in that designation of inanimacy, the beginning of human trafficking where humans in the Atlantic slave trade are brutalized and deemed as brute matter, and therefore just chattels who can be bought and sold and transported. And we also hear the preparation for the systematic de-animation of the living world that is so central to the capitalist project.

Willow

So much of this work and so much of what ails our world today, it really comes down to a question of, are we in alignment with life or not? You know,  I think so often in this movement, it’s been framed as nature or the environment or something, as if it’s something inanimate and other. But it really comes down to this question of, are we moving in the direction of life? I think you point out in the book as well that it, for some reason, it feels almost easier to grasp being able to say, oh, that river is dying.

Robert

Yes.

Willow

Right? It’s like that is so, that is so much more obvious, right? When a river is polluted or unwell, and the logical next step is, well, if it’s dying, then it’s alive.

Robert

Yeah. I use that thought experiment quite a lot, and I think it’s a striking one, and I see people kind of take, double-take it, and it’s good. It’s part of the, what does A. N. Whitehead, this process philosopher, he calls it an allure to the imagination to feel differently, and he says even if a cent is not fully given to a thought experiment, if the thought experiment is a good one, the mind will not spring elastically back into its original shape, I think is something he said. So it’s this, these ways of beginning to think out with the designation of river as matter. H2O plus, plus gravity, and I spent four and a half years doing that, speaking with river people, traveling with and on rivers, thinking with rivers at some level being thought and imagined and felt by them. In ways that reached their sort of surging force in the final pages of the book. But it did take a lot of work, um, and four continents, so it’s not easy.

Willow

I was so gripped by your journey in Los Cedros. Can you share a moment from that trip that really shifted how you were thinking about the rivers that you were with?

Robert

Several of us. Giuliana Furci, a Chilean British mycologist, César Rodriguez Garavito, Cosmo Sheldrake, an extraordinary sound recordist and listener, Martina Bando, who’s an Ecuadorian field naturalist, and Dylan Stirewalt, who is a filmmaker, very involved in Ecuador. We were up at High camp. We’d been up there for a couple of days, so way up toward the summit of the Cloud Forest, far from anywhere. Far from any human structure, howler monkeys and hummingbirds. And the song of the river. I’d wanted to reach the headwaters of the Rio Los Cedros, and we eventually got down to where the river rises in the steep-sided gorge and is surrounded by this epiphytic sea and team of life. Orchids growing on moss, growing on trees, bromeliads thriving on the moss, and life everywhere we looked and felt. We had the river at our feet. And suddenly Giuliana said, “Of course there’s another river,” which is the river beneath our feet, which is where the groundwater is moving, and the mycelium is moving immense quantities of water up and down the fungal hyphae network. And then she said, “And then of course there’s a river above us.” The rivers in the sky. This is back to Elif’s novel. The huge vaporous rivers that move counter gravitationally back uphill to feed and nourish the river that we recognize as river. And then further still, there was, there’s the Star River. One of the constellations above us at the time was named for a river. 

So I suddenly had this intensely powerful sense of flow, of being surrounded by and moved through by forms of flow. And that began to force a reimagination of life and of time. No book I’ve written has ever had as much consequence for me in the ways I feel and see the world as this one.

Willow

The third section of the book, there’s a real sense of reverence that comes through in that section in particular for me, and not just the sort of beholding wonder, but coming face to face with this river, which in so many ways comes through as being a god of sorts. And … curious: How did that experience test you, like physically, emotionally, spiritually?

Robert

Before I made that journey, I, of course, went to the Innu community at Ekuanitshit, a little community of around 600 Innu. And there, I visited the community leader in poet Rita Mestokosho, who is one of the great poets of North America, and asked Rita’s permission to descend this river. And she just laughed at me and said, “Well, obviously you’ve got my permission, but the permission you really need is the river’s permission.” And I was like, “Well, how do I get that Rita?” And she basically said, “You’ll work it all out, but when you’re on the river, you have to.” And here we circle all the way back to the beginning of our conversation. You have to stop thinking so much with your head. You have to stop seeing so much with your eyes, and you have to stop writing things down in your notebook. So…

Willow

Every writer’s worst nightmare.

Robert

Every writer’s worst nightmare. But somewhere between the four years I’d spent following rivers, this very intense encounter with Rita and the instructions she gave me, and then the presence of being on and in and under this river for 12 days, really never leaving the aura of its sound, of its spray, of its being was just immensely powerful. And what began as a physical test quickly became a metaphysical one, as well. And all of these outer skins or husks, the way of being inside the mechanistic worldview grows on you as a kind of exoskeleton or set of coverings. They got worn away very quickly and very strange and extraordinary things began to happen.

Willow

I love the visual of this, the erosion of that mechanistic worldview, and the encasing. I think that we often find ourselves in, and it’s,  easy to become hardened by the traumas that we see in the world and this way of viewing that so many of us are indoctrinated into, and I love the speaking to the river doing what rivers do best, which is to reshape and to flow around that, but also to wear it down.

Robert

Exactly that. They can cut a mountain range in half. They can wear away these shells that we grow. Um, this chiton, this chitinous armor that forms on us and that we don’t see forming often. We kind of can feel it at certain times. It’s actually largely invisible. And then you end up somewhere like that, it, it under conditions like that, and you feel it go. And then the absence is more palpable than the presence. 

If this isn’t too indulgent. And it’s really just ’cause I’m interested in the feelings of it. Not that my book gave it because it’s the river that did it. But why did you cry? 

Willow

So, back in May of this year, I was in the Sacred Valley in Peru. And there was this one day where we were hiking alongside this stream. And at a certain point on the path, we took a break and there was this waterfall or this force, and it was like this tree had grown perfectly for there to be this little seat right next to it. And I sat in it and I sat with the tree and my back to the bark and I sat there for some immeasurable amount of time just being sprayed by the river, and also my tears mixing with that spray, and I had this very clear sense of becoming or being clear and the river just flowing into me and I heard this voice that was very much saying that every stream of my life had brought me there to that moment. And I just, all I could whisper in that moment was just “thank you” again and again and again. And I think something that really resonated with me in this story that you put forward is that in some ways, it’s beyond words. And I feel more in the flow of my life than I have in some time, but also understanding that I’ve always been in the flow of it, if that makes sense.

Robert

It makes perfect sense. Thank you for speaking so openly. It’s beautiful to listen to that and to see that what we might call a set of alignments, but actually is also just the points on a river of continuous flow between them. And is, yes, absolutely recognizable to me.

And this question of language, I’ve always written about things for which language will always be late. Language will always be late for light. It’s simply not fleet enough. It will always be late for any subject, really, because we don’t live in and nor should we long to live in, a meaning system in which language automatically battens onto the real and meets it perfectly. Borges wrote a cautionary tale about the emperor’s cartographers who were instructed to make a map of one-to-one scale of the empire. But of course, it was so vast that it replicated and obliterated the empire itself, and the notion of a pure correspondence between word and thing has always seemed undesirable to me. So actually I have become much more interested in how language fails—that is that Beckett line fail again, fail better. How can we best fail? Where to bring language into relationship and encounter with the given world. And water is, of all the things I’ve tried to write, water is the hardest and the one one fails most at, but possibly the one I’ve failed best at, if that makes sense. And so there was a beautiful futility to trying to, particularly in those final pages, create a kind of spindrift of language that didn’t follow usual causal or propositional orders of meaning, but actually just became a kind of aura or mist, which is what I was meeting and encountering and what was actually writing those words through me in many ways.

Willow

There’s a real sense of you dissolving into the river and the language dissolving into it, into them as well.

Robert

Thank you. That is what I wanted to do, or what the river wanted me to do. I still slightly regret that the main part of the book, before this very strange epilogue that the springs really wrote for me, ends with a full stop. So it ends with the word river. So river has become a kind of verb by that point, a thing that does things. But then I did put a full stop in there, and now I’m wondering whether to take it out for the paperback because the river has no full stop.

Willow

I think that’s a beautiful sentiment, and also I can say the full stop made it land quite powerfully.

Robert

OK.

Willow

So, I would be inclined to keep it.

Robert

Keep the full stop.

Willow

There’s this throughline also of people who are seeking to heal rivers, but also people being healed by the rivers.

Robert

Exactly.

Willow

Do you count yourself among them?

Robert

I haven’t been asked that question, and it’s a brilliant one, and immediately confronts me because my instinct was to say, no, no, no, no. I’m not harmed. I didn’t need healing. I do know that when I lost a friend recently, I went to the springs. Um, the three days after he died, I went to the springs, and that was a very intuitive movement. For me, surprisingly unconsidered, un-rationalized. It was just where I wanted to be. So there’s a kind of an answer for you, and I think it probably translates as yes.

Willow

You know, it’s fascinating. There was almost an immediate association between death and loss and healing. But in my view, the exoskeleton you were describing, the calcification that I think so many of us have experienced—I think the erosion of that is a kind of healing, as well. When a trauma occurs, there’s often a divorce in consciousness, right? That’s how memory gets repressed. It’s the enlivened and the enlightened part of the brain stop speaking. Right? And the trauma disappears. And so, I think quite a lot about our separation from the rest of the realm of nature, it’s a trauma in a lot of ways.

Robert

I think you are right. And I hadn’t thought of it in those terms. I also think of how quickly the exoskeleton regrows. One cannot live always in the river, in the flow. At least I can’t. And very rapidly, when one changes one’s medium, the chiton begins to form again and you can’t see it because it’s invisible on the whole. How powerfully it feels when one is fully exposed, when the armor’s temporarily not in place.

Willow

We have these moments of being, I think, so deeply awakened and conscious of flow, and then we slip out of it. Right? And how are you thinking about or practicing staying present to that flow?

Robert

It’s that classic experience waking from a dream and grasping toward the mist that was so, so palpable and present when you were in the dream state; and then it just evaporates within seconds and/or weeks or months?

Well, I have tried to think very, very consciously, tried to think very differently about time. And there’s a line at the end where I say something like, we are all always already in the current, following the flow, even when we think we’re standing dry-footed on the bank, watching it pass us by. And I think I, as a writer, as a reflector upon the world,, both from my childhood and the work I do as a teacher, I think I had come to think of myself as always standing dry-footed on the bank. That time was happening somewhere else and to someone other, but I know that’s not the case now. And one consequence of that is the prosternation of the given moment. Because if one is always in the flow, then the now is a gift—is a remarkable gift.

Willow

The idea that even if we are not always awake to it, we are always in the flow is so powerful. I think about that and that’s really, in a lot of ways, what that experience I had with the river in the Sacred Valley was understanding: how the flow had brought me to that moment, even in the times where I wasn’t aware. I think about the fact that, you know, my parents being lawyers, that pushed me away from going in a certain direction of my life, right? And I flowed in a direction that ultimately led me to here, having this conversation with you about law.

Robert

Law and life and love and water and flow.

Willow

And all the things.

Robert

Yeah. This feeling that you and I have both had and been involved in water in both our cases, and I’m sure many other people have had in many different circumstances, but which is hard to hold onto. If I’d written a book telling you, Willow, that that was how you could feel and how you should feel it, of course, it simply would’ve had no consequence, no recognition. We’re back to the kind of beautiful failure of language that to create something which is instead an a kind of atmosphere or aura, that you can then participate in the liveliness of language, the flow of language becomes a common ground, or rather a common air or vapor or water, a blue commons in which you and I and others can collaborate.

Willow

Which is why I hope anyone listening runs to pick up this book because there’s so, so much more in it. And I think there’s so much more that’s delivered through the experience of reading it. But hopefully this conversation offers a taste of its waters. Okay, Robert, our final question.

Robert

They’re all good. They’re some of the best I’ve ever had.

Willow

They’re all good. They’re some of the best I’ve ever had.

Robert

Yes. Yes, a river is alive.

Willow

Period. Full stop.

Robert

Full stop. Well, let’s say ellipsis, triple, triple dot, keep it open-ended.

Willow

Perfect.

Robert

Because the river meets the sea and then rises as a river in the sky all the way back up. And re-begins that life-giving, lively living process of flow.

Willow

Thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate and cherish this conversation.

Robert

It’s been really beautiful and really true. Really true and I’m very grateful for it.

Narration

Robert and I discussed some big ideas in this conversation, so I’m sharing a few prompts for how you can carry them forward into your everyday life.

The first is, who are your rivers? Who had the most influence on you growing up and throughout your life? The second, what shifts in language will you carry forward from this conversation? And finally, what helps you be in the flow of your life? 

Head to the show notes for additional resources related to this episode.