Holding the Current

Fear by Kahlil Gibran

It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river can not go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean because only then will fear disappear, because that's where the river will know it's not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.

I’ve been treading water in that place Gibran writes of—where the river meets the sea—fighting the currents, unsure of what comes next. The fear, of course, is not the water itself, but the moment you can no longer remain where you are and cannot yet find your way forward. There is fear too in losing your bearings—no longer knowing yourself as you did before.

Water is the beginning of life. We are held in it before we are born. Our waters break to bring us into the world. Across religious traditions, water signifies cleansing, renewal, and transition—whether in baptism, ritual washing, or practices like Loy Krathong, where offerings are set afloat and carried downstream. These rituals remind us that without water there is no life. It regulates climate, sustains ecosystems, and makes all life possible.

And yet water is not benign. It can carry disease, flood cities, pull us under, take our breath. It resists control. It reminds us how dependent we are and how vulnerable. Even where it sustains life, it is never fixed. It rises, recedes, shifts direction. It does not conform to our expectations.

Some theologians and ecological thinkers have suggested that returning rituals like baptism to living waters—rivers, lakes, and streams—can deepen our sense of connection to the ecosystems that sustain us. To stand in moving water, to feel its temperature and force, is different from encountering it conceptually. Perhaps ritual does not create the sacredness of water so much as give us language for what we already sense.

The tension between water as release and water as containment—is highlighted in the film Water: Hindu widows live out their lives along the river—surrounded by a symbol of purification and release. They are also confined and marginalized by their religion and society's constructs around identities defined by loss. The story centers on a child—widowed before she has even grown into the life she was assigned—absorbed into that system without consent, without any path back to who she might have been.

That dynamic feels familiar to me. I am not widowed as society defines it, but the tragic loss of my daughter's father places me within that condition—the way a life's memories and hopes are reshaped around absence. It is a narrowing under the weight of what has been taken, even when the loss doesn't fit neatly into the categories we use to name it.

When loss fits a recognized form, people know how to respond. There are rituals, language, roles that organize care around those who are grieving. When it does not, there is a kind of silence—not intentional, but felt nonetheless—where structures that might hold you simply do not appear.

In that absence, one is left holding what is still as real but less easily named—suspended in that place where the river meets the sea, swirling without direction, unable to find the current.

My own relationship with water has never been abstract. I tend toward motion—body and mind always active. But when I sit beside water—a river, a reservoir, the ocean—something shifts. My attention settles into the movement of the water—the ripples, the current lapping the shore. The sound envelopes me and I find solace within it.

A deeper sense of peace comes from time spent with the people I love. Those moments—rare, fleeting—when everything aligns and you feel held within something larger than yourself, where nothing needs to be added or explained. Those are the moments I have spent my life trying to return to. Memories of such moments often overshadow any of the mistakes or misunderstandings that shaped the relationship.

Lately, water has become the place I go when I don’t know what to do with what I've now been carrying for far too long.

There are times when this feels less like forward movement and more like trying to hold position in something that will not settle. Not drowning, but not being carried either. The river does not get to stop. It meets what comes—rocks, bends, barriers—and finds a way through or around. It continues, regardless of conditions.

There is another kind of place water gathers—the place Gibran names in his poem—where the river meets the sea but does not yet become it. Estuaries are not calm. Tides push in as currents pull out. Fresh and salt water mix unevenly, and salinity shifts constantly. Nothing stabilizes. And yet life exists precisely because of that instability. Species that survive in estuaries are not fixed; they adjust continuously to changing conditions, to what the water brings in each moment.

I recognize that kind of place now—not as a crossing, but as a condition. Not having arrived, not having let go, but living inside the mix of what was and what is. It is not stillness. It is not resolution. It is the movement toward discernment and whatever comes after loss.

Sometimes it feels like being caught in an eddy—circling, moving but not progressing, pulled into a pattern that does not release. The panic there is different. It is not the shock of impact or the force of a breaking wave. It is the realization that you can keep moving and still not go anywhere. That you may remain there longer than you thought possible. The fear Gibran writes of is not the sea. It is where the struggle to orient ends. What I fear is becoming caught in the circling, unable to find the current again.

The way out is not force. As with riptides, fighting an eddy will lead only to exhaustion—not escape. The only way out is at the seam—the place where the circling water meets the larger flow. And finding that seam requires something that is not instinctive in moments of fear. It requires a steadiness of attention—the ability to remain present enough to notice where movement is still possible. If I am overwhelmed, I miss it. If I am avoiding, I never reach it. This is the work now—not to force resolution, not to become numb to what I feel, but to remain steady enough to recognize the moment when something shifts.

This week marks one year since I’ve seen my daughter, heard her voice, hugged her and made her a morning cup of tea. Today marks four years since her father was hit by a car and never woke up. We have had some trouble learning to live with that. Loss does not only take people. It takes the imagined future alongside them. The version of life you thought you were moving toward dissolves, and with it, the self that existed within that future. I had imagined that over time he would have become a more consistent and meaningful presence in her life—that there would be shared moments: graduations, rugby matches, milestones, where we would stand together as her parents. Having lost my own father at twenty, I only ever had an imagined version of what that might be like. That story is gone, and my heart aches for what she has lost. And now, even the version where it would be just the two of us—or just me, alone, cheering her on as it always has been—has fractured as well.

There are losses that are visible and named, and others that are not. There are moments when your role is to hold space for someone else’s grief, to ensure they are supported, while your own goes unacknowledged. That absence does not pass quickly. It settles. It leaves a residue, a shadow over everything else.

Since my return here, I have been drawn back to a place I used to go as a teenager—Reservoir 6—where I would sit and watch the sunset, where I would jump from the rocks in the summer. When I visited the other day, I noticed a bowl of fruit left on the stones near where I sit and chant. It seemed an offering of sorts. It reminded me of the spirit houses I had seen in Thailand, where people leave small tokens by water. Months ago, I had left a small feather there—an offering of my own. It had been a small attempt at a symbolic release of someone I once loved. When I came back again, the wind had carried the feather away, and flowers had been arranged in its place.

I am not the only one who comes to that water carrying something. I am not the only one seeking solace there. That shared instinct—to pause, to leave something behind, to mark a moment—feels sacred in itself. Perhaps ritual does not make water sacred so much as help us recognize what is already present. Across traditions, people return to water at moments of transition—birth, loss, renewal—not only because they are taught to do so, but because something in those places holds their heart.

I am still in that place where the river meets the sea. The currents pull in more than one direction. There are moments of turbulence, moments of circling, moments where I cannot see what comes next. But there are also moments—brief, subtle—where something shifts. A faint pull at the edge of the circling. A moment to catch my breath.

Out of the confusion, where the river meets the sea, something new will arrive.

Safe for Navigation

As a child of literary parents growing up in West Hartford in the 70s, some of my earliest memories of Hartford revolve around visits to the Mark Twain House. My mother was a high school English teacher and loved that Twain’s house was so close. Whenever visitors came to town—especially during the holidays—that was where we went. On the house tour you can see the desk where he sat to write Huckleberry Finn. My mom dressed as Twain for her students, complete with a white suit and gray mustache. Before school one morning, I recall spraying gray into her wig as she transformed into Samuel Clemens for her class. I wish I had a photograph of her like that now.

My brother and I embodied her enthusiasm in our own way. One afternoon, bored and looking for something to do, we began reading passages from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn aloud, experimenting with the dialects of Twain’s characters. We recorded ourselves acting out the voices. When my mother discovered the tape, she was delighted—not only because we were reading Twain, but because we were doing something creative instead of causing mischief.

At the time I had no idea that Twain’s house had overlooked the North Branch of the Park River. The neighborhood where he lived—Nook Farm—took its name from a bend, or “nook,” in the river that bordered the community. From his Hartford home, Mark Twain once looked out across wetlands and floodplain along the river’s edge.

Twain knew rivers. Before he became a writer, Samuel Clemens worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. His pen name—“Mark Twain”—came from riverboat language meaning two fathoms deep: water that was safe for navigation. To pilot a riverboat required more than steering a vessel; it meant learning how to read the currents, depths, and shifting channels of a river. Rivers were not simply scenery to Twain; they were living landscapes that shaped human life. I returned to my hometown to live beside his little river to pause and reflect upon the currents, depths and shifting channels of my own life.

Long before Twain arrived in Hartford,  the rivers of this region flowed through the homelands of Indigenous peoples including the Podunk and Wangunk. The Park River is one tributary within the watershed of the Connecticut River, a river system that has shaped life in this region for centuries. Indigenous traditions across North America emphasize relationships with particular places and landscapes. As Vine Deloria Jr. explains, Native understandings of land differ sharply from Western ideas of wilderness: land is not an empty backdrop for human activity but a living presence within which human life unfolds.¹

By the late nineteenth century Hartford’s relationship with the Park River had changed dramatically. Once known as the Hog River, the waterway became heavily polluted by mills, factories, and urban sewage. Seasonal flooding added to the problem. After devastating floods in the 1930s, city planners turned to engineering solutions. Beginning in the 1940s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers buried much of the river in massive underground conduits designed to control flooding and protect development. The project succeeded technically, but it also removed the river from everyday life. What had once been a visible feature of Hartford’s landscape became infrastructure hidden beneath streets and parking lots.²

There is an unsettling parallel here. The same society that buried the Park River beneath concrete has also struggled with the truths Mark Twain tried to surface. Huckleberry Finn, written in this very neighborhood, has become one of the most frequently banned and challenged books in American classrooms. Often, the justification centers on Twain’s use of the N-word. Yet that reasoning obscures the deeper purpose of the novel. Twain used the language of his time to expose the moral failures of that society, not to endorse them. Jim, the enslaved man at the center of the story, emerges as the most humane and morally grounded character in the book. Like the river, the novel forces a confrontation with what lies beneath the surface. And like the river, it has been easier to contain, censor, or redirect it than to fully face what it reveals. What we bury—whether waterways or histories—does not disappear. It continues to shape the world above it.

What happened to the Park River was not unusual. Throughout the twentieth century many cities buried rivers in concrete channels or underground conduits in order to control flooding and make room for roads and development. In recent decades however, urban planners and environmentalists have begun reversing this trend through projects known as ‘daylighting’, which restore buried rivers to the surface. Cities such as Seoul, London, and Yonkers have uncovered waterways once hidden beneath highways and streets, demonstrating how rivers can again become living parts of urban ecosystems.³

A similar transformation has taken place only a few miles away. In neighboring West Hartford, Trout Brook--one of the tributaries that eventually feeds the Park River--has been revitalized over the past two decades into a green corridor with a walking and biking path. What was once a neglected drainage channel is now a vibrant community space where people run, cycle, rollerblade and walk. They can encounter the small ecosystems that persist along its banks. Seeing that restoration makes it easier to imagine what might still be possible for the Park River. Maybe HIU can adopt this stretch of the Park River and do seasonal cleanups as a community to restore access to what it once was. Becoming at home in a watershed may begin with something as simple as noticing the river beside us. However small acts of stewardship embody regenerative future in this place. Our environmental ethics class hosted a guest speaker, theologian Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, who described this kind of shift as the work of moral vision: first seeing clearly what is happening to the Earth, then imagining regenerative futures, recognizing the collective power to move forward in hope, and finally learning to see the beauty that calls us to protect what remains.⁸

Since my return to my hometown in July, I live on Lorraine Street, less than a mile from Twain’s house, at the edge of Hartford International University of Religion and Peace. Just across the street, the North Branch of the Park River still flows above ground for a short stretch before disappearing into the tunnels beneath the city. It's green, dark, and overgrown. After many years living beside rivers around the world—from the Chao Phraya in Bangkok to the Toyohira in Sapporo, the East River in New York, to the Liffey in Dublin and the Tiber in Rome—I realized that another small river was flowing just across the street from where I now live. It is interesting to compare and contrast all these rivers and how they have been incorporated into the societies around them, for better or worse.

What appears to be a small overgrown stream beside the road is actually a part of a much larger system. The Park river watershed stretches across roughly seventy-eight square miles from the Metacomet Ridge-- where I often hike and where legends claim King Philip once roamed--down to the Connecticut River, gathering water from towns across central Connecticut before disappearing beneath Hartford.⁴

In the summer heat, the shaded river corridor acts like a natural air conditioner. Sitting on the covered Victorian porch, you can feel cool air rising from the riverbank and drifting across the street while birds fill the trees with early morning song. My landlady, the mom of one of my childhood friends, who has lived in the neighborhood for decades, remembers when there was once a walking path along the river where she’d  walk her dogs. She described a time when the river was far more open and accessible than it is today.

The river corridor is more alive than it first appears. One morning a black bear wandered out of the overgrown riverbank, ambled up through the brush, and continued calmly down the street toward a yard with a hummingbird feeder. Having just lived in Jackson, Wyoming—where we had to worry about grizzlies getting into garbage cans—the sight was  surprising. Never in my life growing up here did I imagine there were bears moving quietly through my hometown shadows. Yet the river still carries a thread of wilderness through this neighborhood on the edge of the urban center.

Paying attention to this small stretch of river has changed the way I think about the place where I live.  Robin Wall Kimmerer compels us that ecological relationships begin with learning to notice the life around us and recognizing that flourishing depends on reciprocity between humans and the more-than-human world.⁵ Writer Barbara Kingsolver underscores the idea that human beings become truly “at home” in a landscape when they begin to learn its patterns, histories, and living rhythms.⁶ Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh sagely advises that awakening begins when we see that we are not separate from the Earth itself.⁷

Cities often forget the rivers that shaped them. In Hartford, much of the Park River now flows unseen beneath the streets. Yet standing on Lorraine Street, where the North Branch still moves quietly through a shaded corridor beside my home, it becomes clear that the river has not disappeared. It still cools the air on summer evenings. Birds still gather in the trees along its banks. And occasionally, a wandering bear still follows its hidden path through the city.

Samuel Clemens once learned to read rivers for a living. From his home in Nook Farm he looked out across the floodplain of the Park River while writing stories about life along the Mississippi. Today that same river flows mostly unseen beneath Hartford’s streets. Yet the water continues its quiet journey toward the Connecticut River, moving through the city whether we notice it or not.  I am taking Thich Nhat Hahn’s advice and making a point of paying attention.

Learning to belong to a place may begin with something simple: learning how to read the water and thrive in harmony with its currents.

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Notes

1. Vine Deloria Jr., “American Indians and the Wilderness,” in American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Vine Deloria Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).

2. Bushnell Park Conservancy, “The Park River.”

3. Ethan Arcata, “Revitalizing Rivers: The Park River’s Legacy,” ArcGIS StoryMap, November 29, 2023.

4. Park Watershed, Inc., “About the Watershed,” https://www.parkwatershed.org/about-the-watershed/

5. Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013).

6. Barbara Kingsolver, “Knowing Our Place,” in High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (New York: HarperCollins, 1995)

7. Thích Nhất Hạnh, The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2008).

8. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023).

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Bibliography

Bushnell Park Conservancy. “The Park River.” Hartford.
https://bushnellpark.org/about-2/history-2/the-park-river

Deloria, Vine, Jr.  “American Indians and the Wilderness.” In American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Vine Deloria Jr. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Arcata, Ethan. “Revitalizing Rivers: The Park River’s Legacy.” ArcGIS StoryMap, November 29, 2023.  https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/72398371e8b24912903bc30653a95cd6

Kadinsky, Sergey. “Park River, Hartford.” Hidden Waters Blog, September 11, 2024.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Kingsolver, Barbara. “Knowing Our Place.” In High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Park Watershed, Inc. “About the Watershed." https://www.parkwatershed.org/about-the-watershed/

Thích Nhất Hạnh. The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2008.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1884.