Thursday, September 18, 2025

Hybridized with the larger situation

each week at Fullersburg, the cottonwoods are making fall happen

Macfarlane ends the Canada section with saying "I am rivered."  The placement of that phrase makes me think that there is something important about that.  I can't really get my head around it.  But slightly earlier in the section there's this section which is mostly a quotation from his friend Wayne, which is compelling:

Rivers are running through me, I think; I've been flowed through and onwards.

    When I mention this to Wayne, he nods in recognition.

    'Oh yes,' he says, 'T've also felt something like this. I think it's important to recognize that this kind of merging doesn't happen as an epiphany; it's a chronic rather than an acute process. Paddling into those headwinds. The appearance of a pine marten at the first river camp. Being slapped and dunked and twisted by the rapids. I've not felt ... entirely myself, as if I've been somehow - and not voluntarily, and not entirely pleasantly - hybridized with the larger situation in which we have been participating during this journey, which includes, perhaps above all, this giant body of moving water with whom we have all been flowing.'  p. 290

Here we get, in more concrete terms, a different picture than "I experienced some good things on our kayak trip, and some challenging adventures."  Instead, the situation is one vast scene and he is "participating" in the situation. The medium of all of it is this vast and powerful body of water that has carved rocks.  The participating, the hybridizing is called "a merging."


I also appreciate the catalog:  paddling into the wind, appearance of a rare animal, being manhandled by the river.


On This Day (09/18):

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