There’s your business, other peoples’ business, God’s business, and THEN there’s the fourth business — the floodplain. And that’s the lushest business of all.

[For a practical river practice: skip to the end.]

God’s Business*

A pull by some unseen attractive force:  you fall in that direction.

You flow. And that’s where all your power comes from.

(If your flow’s blocked, you’re not only stopped in place but easily infiltrated by others’ agendas.)

Your Business

That stuff you come across as you flow: the sediment, soil, and rock of the world through which you flow: you carry, shape, and set them down in various turns.

This is your life’s work. This is how you form your edges and your base — the dimensions of your life that make you you and allow you to flow like a river and not just a sheet of water creeping across the land.

(If your boundaries aren’t maintained, you get overwhelmed — we say such a river has lost its integrity and can’t carry its burden. Plus you cut into the world in a harsh, unstable way.)

Others’ Business

The uplands: you’ve no role there.

Its inhabitants may visit you for refreshment; its burdens may wash into your channel; but you’ve no control out there.

(If you’re out there it means you’ve been diverted — dammed or forcibly pumped away from the direction God’s business pull you. All kinds of problems ensue in your channel and even in the uplands since its not built for your energy. Soils may become saline; native plants may be replaced by invasive species; animals that depend on those plants suffer.)

The Fourth Business

The floodplain.

Here is where you and the others and God all meet and co-create.

The result — no matter whether its the narrow shelf of a self-sufficient F-type river or the wide expanse of the delta’s Da- or the sinuous, focused E-type river — is a lush, even, open space.

A river’s best friends — deep-rooted, woody vegetation AKA trees — can grow there. Animals and insects thrive there and indeed require its presence.

The floodplain is built by — and allows — your flooding. It makes your natural, expected overflows safe and, indeed, vital. The floodplain allows — and is built by — your meandering. This makes for a lot more fun and chaos in the world (and increasing that entropy is not only interesting but required by the Second Law of Thermodynamics!).

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It all feeds into each other: Your flow allows you to do your life’s work with integrity and then those resulting boundaries allow you to overflow safely into the outside world where, together with that world, you build the richest ecosystem of all, the riparian zone, which gives you and others the ability to adjust to whatever nature throws your way and to do it with beauty.

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Like a river, we most naturally and healthily relate to others in a space thats not exactly us and not exactly other. We meet one another in a place between us and make something there together. It’s fun and messy, and that’s probably the point.

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A practical river practice: Ask someone to make something with you. It will be shared creation — not yours and not their but a separate being. It could be collaborating on a doodle, a song, a dance; planting a plant; cooking some food; writing a naughty limerick or an ecstatic poem; carving a bar of soap, raising a barn, sewing a quilt; arranging flowers. This is especially useful when you need to figure out boundaries. If there’s someone who seems to infiltrate you with their mood or opinions (especially opinions about you) or if there’s someone who you tend to inundate, try this. And please share with me what you make!

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* As always, wherever you see the word God please substitute Nature, Universe, Uterus, Mystery, Ineffable, Unspeakable (YHWH), Source, Goddess, Unknowable, or whatever word appeals to you.