Jean Smith on “Stepping into the river of life”

A reflection on practice by Jean Smith

We can study discourses and sermons, we can read countless books, we can hear hundreds or perhaps even thousands of talks. Although these secondary sources give us many clues about the nature of our world, only direct experience can give us true insight into the most essential aspects of our reality, especially impermanence.

Most of us have heard and conceded the adage that we can’t step in the same river twice, but until we wade into a stream and feel the current swirling around our calves as it urges leaves and twigs past us, we do not really get, at a kinetic level, what this saying means. And we are just like that stream. Each of us is made up of and surrounded by elements that are constantly changing. As Zen teacher Jisho Warner has said, “Impermanence is a great river of phenomena, of beings, things, and events, coming to be and passing away in dependence on each other. This natural order of things includes us, and its laws are our laws. Each of us is an endless moving stream within an endless moving stream.”

For many years I had a home on the Ausable River, in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York, and that river was a wily teacher. I came to understand that being a moving stream in a moving stream does not mean that our lives flow through without changing and being changed. Over the years I watched the river carve the shoreline, carrying sand downstream as it widened meanders, making sandbars in the already broad and shallow areas. I saw the river’s color changed by the shore, where iron-rich clays narrowed the channel. The water rose and fell with rains in the mountains, carried whole trees downstream in the fury of a flood, buckled bridges with crusted ice. But even in the most bitter frozen winterscape, always through the ice I could see the river’s flow.

Another metaphor used for our impermanence is standing at the edge of a river and studying the small whirlpools that form then fade away. There is no difference between the river and the whirlpools except the whirlpools’ temporary coherence: existing, changing, not existing.

—-Excerpted from Jean’s book Life Is Spiritual Practice, from Wisdom Publications