Channeling the Flow

wisdom from the river

Jan 13, 2023

“Nature is our best ally.”

That’s Frans Schepers from an organization called Rewilding Europe, an organization working to create more nature areas on the continent. I learned about him last week in an article about the Waal River in the Netherlands. The Waal is prone to bad floods, a problem that will only intensify as climate change continues.

For a long time, communities in the Netherlands built elaborate fortifications to control the high waters. (There’s a reason the little boy who stuck his finger into a dike was Dutch.) These solutions are expensive and unsightly, and not all that effective–despite the dikes, major floods in the ’90s required the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. Communities found themselves locked in an arms race against Mother Nature, a battle they were destined to lose: as temperatures rise, the atmosphere will hold ever more moisture, leading to torrential rains and more rivers overflowing their banks.

Finally, folks stopped trying to prevail against the river. Instead, the city of Nijmegen went from “wall it in” to “let it flow,” in a program called Room for the River. Through a stunning alliance of local governments, business interests, and environmental organizations, a channel was dug parallel to the Waal. Now when the floods come, the waters fill that secondary channel alongside the river. There’s an island between the two channels that was originally going to include housing, but after the people embraced the land as a park, that plan was abandoned.

“With its dangerous currents and busy shipping traffic, the Waal had been useless for recreation,” according to the article. “Now, runners and walkers frequent footpaths through the island’s shrubby vegetation. In warm weather, the island hosts festivals. Rowers and swimmers paddle the calm waters of the manmade channel.”

I told you last week that, despite being a New Year’s enthusiast, I was resisting any attempts to set goals or intentions. The minute I read this story, I realized I didn’t need a resolution or a goal or even a word for the year. I needed a parable, this parable, to take with me into 2023.

I offer it to you as well, if you need it.

If you, too, find yourself fighting against the flow rather than making Room for the River.

If you, too, have a tendency toward rigid, tight-gripped control. Turns out my life isn’t better the more I white-knuckle it, and a bunch of stuff that used to work no longer does. As one person said of the dikes, “If you make something ugly, which functions once every thousand years, but looks ugly every day, then you’re doing a stupid thing.” (Insert Michael Jordan “and I took that personally” GIF here.)

I laughed when I realized that the two words I’ve been toying with lately, ease and boundaries, are right there in the story. When we stop fighting against the torrent–against reality itself–and embrace the world as it is, that’s a move toward ease. But that doesn’t mean we wholly surrender to chaos, either. The Waal River’s secondary channel is a very intentional boundary, but like all of the most effective boundaries, it’s organic, flexible.

What does living this parable look like in practice? For me it means practicing the Ignatian concept of holy indifference (thanks to my friend Jeff Lehn for his wonderful new podcast, The Daily Edify). It means making nature my ally, including the wisdom of creation and of my own body, which rarely steers me wrong if I but listen to it. It means taking a good look at what’s serving me and what’s not, which takes discernment. I used a daily planner for a few years that had all kinds of fun checklists and trackers and inspirational quotes. I thrived with it for a long time until suddenly it became laughably cumbersome. I’m currently using a plain old spiral notebook.

Mostly it means self kindness, and realizing how outmatched I am in comparison to the river… and finding that unexpectedly comforting.

The Blue Room with MaryAnn McKibben Dana

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