• Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it. Neils Bohr

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RSS Peaceful Awakenings

  • Someday I Will Be Doing Research Again
    Until that point apparently I will just pop in once a year or so and remind people that it is the Opet season, a time when we show civic support for our broader communities here at Peaceful Awakenings’ Take On Kemetic Social Values. If anyone wants to join me, The Emboatening Crew on Kiva is […]
  • Opet Again
    Just popping in to remind everyone that with the Opet season upon us again, the Emboatening Crew is still rolling to support Kiva loans. (My office renovations are going well if slowly, so who knows if that means I’ll get more work done when they’re done.)
  • CowOfGold Moving
    An update on my previous post: Cow of Gold will have a new home here when the maintainer has a chance to put up the site again (with some revisions, apparently).

RSS Hills of the Horizon

  • Hills of the Horizon: The Past is Another Country
    The problem with extrapolation from history is that nothing is testable. The evolution of a religion over time is not a predictable and easily comprehensible thing, where we can look at a point in time and say, "It was like this then, so it would be like that now." The process of deciding what needs […]

The River

The river is the central artery of being.

It emerges from somewhere else. It emerges from the cataract. It emerges from the land of spirit, from the land of the dead, from the hands of those who guard the gates of its flow.

It emerges from the places where there are hidden stars, never seen. From mysteries, from the fonts of sacredness, the places of invisible lives.

It flows out from there, and it brings life with it, the sustenance that will make the land blossom. It brings new earth; it brings release from thirst. When it floods, it brings dread things, dire things, that escape and run rampant until they are again contained, turned away, banished.

There is no power that is not ambivalent. The water flows and it bears the power of life from the font from which life emerges; the water flows and it brings plague as well. The water flows too high and it washes everything away, eating away houses, devouring anything not built in stone; the water flows too low and there is no new earth, no growing season, and thirst.

The river connects. Its roots in the hidden realms give rise to the power to go from city to city, from place to place, to allow other flows to exist. Its perpetual boundary is also a perpetual highway, letting the living reach to each other, to travel, to span the distance between them.

The river is perilous. The crocodiles will return the unwary to the depths of unbeing, the roots of where water came from. The hippopotamus tramples if enraged. The waters themselves, that give life, will kill, and drowning can create gods.

The river has its rhythms, its pulses, its high times and low times.

Even as it emerges from the unseen, from the realms of the dead, it flows past that which is human, and out into the unspeakable and the dangerous and the foreign. The flow does not stop here; the river’s purposes go beyond that which is human.

Like all great powers, the river is generous, within its bounds.