On Waterfalls, Grief, and the Power of Change

On a long awaited getaway to one of my heart places, the North Shore of Minnesota, I came close to rivers that were once broad and mighty waterfalls. I saw the story of their past, the way the water had carved into the earth over centuries and millennia. Ancient waterfalls and glaciers have intrigued me as of late. The way a waterfall moves backwards in space - we as tiny Earth creatures don’t see that story in real time. All we see is a beautiful feature of nature. We hear the white noise of crashing water and it allows us, or it allows me, anyway, a moment of rest. An opportunity for reflection. As I meandered along the banks of these great waterfalls, holding my grief tenderly close to my chest, I couldn’t help but see the parallels laid obnoxiously bare in front of my eyes. A cavernous gorge of which I could not see the bottom, sending a chill almost a mile up to where I stood. I considered the thousands of years of erosion, carving down, deep into the crust of the Earth. I stared into it and compared it to my heart. The water keeps carving down the same channel. Does it always hurt like this, I ask the Earth? She whispers, it hurts most when you resist. Let it flow. Let grief change you. 

Another day, I followed a river up its winding bank to the falls of Devil’s Kettle. There’s something of a mystery around this location, the kettle. The river splits into two channels at the falls, and one seems to disappear into a deep and unsettling hole. Where does it go? Science knows now, kind of. It just re-emerges into the same river, underground, somehow. I’m skeptical. No one’s been in there? We know where it goes now, but do we know how? Humans tend to be too obsessed with knowing things, having all the answers. As I hiked up to my destination, I was content with the unknown. It was enough to marvel at the majesty of the mystery. 

As I hiked back down the hill, following the river, the Temperance gorge was called back to mind. The ancient and ongoing process of erosion weaved itself into a metaphor for the human condition, a contextualizing of the way we experience life and grief. The water always, unceasingly flows down the same channel. At the point where the water falls, there is action. There is energy. You’ll feel it when you stand there. That is the moment of heartbreak, or the moment of change. It’s turbulent, it throws rocks and sticks and even full trees around and down the river. The noise at that moment, at that location, is constant. It must hurt. If the Earth’s surface were akin to human flesh, that velocity would cause harm, rupture, break, blood, and it does. The power of a waterfall is a constant process of change. Slowly, moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day and year by year, the surrounding environment is carved away. It is changed. The presence of grief is a constant process of alchemy. The beliefs we once held about the world and our place in it are carved away by the violence of loss, and with all this loose matter we have no choice but to create new meaning. By grief, we are changed. 

As I move down the river, the crevasses gape wider. The rapids slow. The action eventually settles. In this mile’s journey, one can almost visualize how this happened, the  thousands of years of erosion. In this, I saw the reflection of my own past, my pain. Every heartbreak I’ve endured stays with me. Every present and future heartbreak travels through those same scars. But the further from the falls I go, the less present is that past pain. It becomes information, context, memory. It becomes the piled rocks along the banks, spit out by the rushing, active waterfall that once existed in this very location. A distant memory. While beautiful and awe-inspiring, it looks a mess. Scattered branches and dirt and moss continue cascading off the riverbed. Evidence of the power of change. Even in the quiet flow of the river remains the force of the waterfall. It just gets easier, the further you go from the event of heartbreak or change. The further you go from the waterfall, it just gets quieter. The further I go, the more open I must be. In attempting to close my heart down as a response to pain, I am defying the laws of nature. 

I am trying, as I hope all of us are, to stay open in the face of immense fear, pain, uncertainty. Occurrences beyond our control are as unfair as ever. And yet, the water still flows. At the moment of insight, I felt illuminated and made anew, as if this knowledge could alter the course of future pain at the moment of change. I now realize it does not, but I do know that if we keep walking, we will end up in the future, at the banks of a calm flowing river framed by rocks smoothed by violence. When we remain open, we allow the integration of new perspectives, understanding of why our shape has changed, and where that may lead us. Above all, I realize that we need one another. Like the river needs each fish and bug and algae that calls it home, and the trees aligning the bed need each strand of mycelium webbing under the dirt, none of us can survive the moment of change without support, without symbiotic relationship. May we hold one another through this moment of change. May we allow the turbulent waters to carve away a new reality of love and connection. May we hold the capacity to both resist and allow, trusting our inner wisdom (that of the Earth herself) to show us the when and how.