Emblematic Wisdom | Kin, flow and gender
The art of noticing. The art of weaving our senses and imaginations into life. The art of being spirited away by the world. The art of being enlivened and entangled.
This is a thought-wandering (or thought-yarning, appreciating that my most intriguing inquiries arise through conversations with peers and friends and through engaging with the world). In this style, I write in a stream of consciousness, giving myself permission to channel what arises as I write into the flow without the usual process of over-editing and censoring myself. I must say, this feels quite vulnerable. Likely, I will get things “wrong”, change my opinion and/or deepen my understanding. I write from my own perspective, framed by my experience as a White woman who grew up in the UK, between the city and the countryside, and now lives on the Atlantic Coast of Portugal. Learn more here.
These recent challenging months have been about holding onto simple pleasures. I live a few moments walk from a river mouth, where water tumbles – or sometimes creeps or trickles, depending on the season – from the land to the ocean. Observing the aliveness of this river has become a great pleasure of mine.
I’ve wanted to write about this river for a while, and now that I’ve come to do so, I feel uninspired, not because my muse is lacking, but probably because I’m not drawing from a real connection. So, before I continue this writing, I’m going to visit her.
I’m back, having sat with her this morning.
I find it intriguing that I gendered the river with female pronouns. Living in Portugal, with its Romance language, I think about this a lot: the gendering of everything. The Portuguese (language, at least) sees the river as masculino. O Rio. I wonder who decided this. I note that nouns often are gendered in a number of languages. (This thought is spinning this writing out in a way that I hadn’t intended, but true to the style I am writing in, I will flow with it. Though, I’m wary that I am probably not equipped to adequately discuss gender in an expansive way).
It’s interesting because I don’t usually engage with the world by assigning gender. The English language – my mother tongue – doesn't ask for this. But I think beyond grammar, this speaks to something else, something bigger – perhaps even something regarding my own relationship with gender. Because for creatures like rivers and mountains and trees and stones, we aren’t talking about sex – we are indeed dolling out constructed ideas of who they are.
My feeling that the river is feminine is a personal construction. But is it too limiting? Does it enforce a binary that’s been oh-so-useful for creating dangerous and damaging social roles and gender norms and ideals?
I grew up in a time before gender identity was so prominently in public discourse, or at least before how it is today. I also grew up as someone who climbed trees, played in the dirt and was always covered in grazes. I looked like a girl, and I behaved like someone who loved being outdoors, bold and adventurous. As I recall, it was only my paternal grandma who would remark on me not being “lady-like” enough. My maternal grandma would call me a Tom Boy. I didn’t really know what this meant, but I got the gist: she believed my behaviours were more boy-like than girl-like. I was starting to understand that your sex somehow determines who you should be in the world, and apparently, that included playing with dolls and not in the mud if you were a girl, despite what actually excited and enlivened you. I didn’t comply, or at least not until the rules made me; the skirts I was obligated to wear due to school uniform rules turned out to be inappropriate attire for tree climbing. In fact, they proved inappropriate, I was told, for many of the things I loved, and so my behaviours began to be shaped by gender norms.
I’ve always felt that one’s essence is who one is. Gender, as it was constructed in binary and norms, seemed like a box to contain and even constrain one’s essence. I have never felt the inclination to extend this containment or constraint to the more-than-human (well, I guess this isn’t true – case in point with the pronoun I chose in reference to the river). Not that this was a cognitive decision, rather, it was an intuitive one – of course, while growing up, I didn’t have the understanding, intellect or language to discuss or describe this. But I felt that our biology and essence are distinct albeit entangled.
I note that there are belief systems around the world, both new and old, that observe feminine and masculine energies – not that this conflates with gender or sex. So maybe the reason I describe the river as feminine is from sensing an expression of feminine energy. I caution this as not something solid but perceived by me, framed by my experiences and my beliefs.
Let me return from this unexpected tangent to thoughts and reflections on the aliveness of the river. (I nearly wrote “and personhood”, but I stopped myself because I think offering so-called personhood to more-than-humans may be another trapping of anthropocentrism. I think. Though, I don’t say this with certainty).
Daily, I witness the aliveness of this river. O Rio Safarugo. Their course begins not so far from my home, two towns inland. I regularly jog upstream, along their (I keep wanting to write “her” – should I?) course, from her bulging mouth to her slim stream that carves through the countryside.
She is most active in the winter months. Her flow changes constantly. At her mouth, she continuously shape-shifts, playing with the sand and silt, feeling into new lines, transforming who she is in the world as she meets the ocean – her width, breadth and depth, her winding and weaving form, her ferocity and movement. At this time of year, changes are rarely incremental.
Today, the wind tickles her wide, gentle surface and creates an optical illusion of patterns that belie the direction of flow: she appears to be moving upstream. Perhaps she is. The frothing ocean laps in and grabs the riverwater in rhythmic snatches. She tucks into the ocean. As these kin meet, there’s a moment of tension as the freshwater and saltwater collide and combine.
Her sandbanks look sturdy and aged, but they are deceitful. Sand is fickle. Sand is a trickster, unfixed, unforgiving and oftentimes devious. Tomorrow, the sand, like her, will be completely different.
The valley that carries her begs to be a wetland. Conspiring with the sand and sea, she often blockades her passage at her mouth and floods the valley floor, spilling out and saturating the land. The humans allow this only for so long, until the beach carpark or the few houses that have been built mere metres above the historic wetland are threatened or flooded. A yellow-toothed machine is brought in to drag back the sandy, silty buildup, releasing millions of litres of freshwater, with a huge sediment load from upstream run-off, into the ocean. Though it’s now ditched and drained, the birds still come here. Perhaps not all who once did, but some at least: geese, ducks, kingfishers and a range of waterbirds.
In the summer, her flow often turns to a tiny trickle. The year before last, she dried up completely. If she were allowed (is this the right word, as if humans have the authority to permit such things) to be a wetland, would this happen? With her ancient wisdom, if she determined her own course and where and how she stored water in collusion with the land, would she have ever run dry? Would the endemic fish that were once found in her water body still be alive? In a grim memoriam, a board celebrating this endemic fish species is sited next to her. I wonder what other souls have passed on but unnoticed. (Just to note, I don’t know for sure that this endemic species no longer exists, but on account of it being endemic and the river drying up at least to a considerable distance inland, toward her source, I suspect this to be true).
I witness her aliveness every day. I feel that she is alive – even though her kind never made it into the Kingdoms of Life. I wonder if my gendering the river is, on the one hand, a way for me to validate my recognition of her animacy and spirit, but also, on the other hand, me falling folly to anthropomorphism and the gender binary. In combining these, an interesting thing may be happening: gender norms for humans roll into a projection that conflates those gender norms with the river’s expressions and behaviours. I’ve never really thought about this before.
Why am I sharing about her? I wanted to speak about animacy, but this text went in a different direction. More than that, I guess it’s because living with her, by her, affects me. Because I care, and observing her, being with her, means something to me. I find her intriguing and luring. I find her presence comforting. She’s become a sort of emblem of how I’m learning to approach life: moving with change, expecting storms, conspiring with others, nurturing a whole, moving creatively, finding a balance of ferocity and calm.
And so she teaches me wisdoms of greater intelligences than my own – than those that arise from my own cognition. As per my last Substack, this is a learning that I’m trying to bring to my own body.
Forgive me for falling back into using she/her pronouns when speaking of the river. Water, for me, often has a feminine quality that asks that I refer to her in this way.
Recommendation
Each Substack, I want to share «something» that has nourished me, shaped me and/or has become tangled up in my way of seeing and being in the world.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
I read this book at the end of last year. I bought it years ago, just before a trip to Kerala and had the best intentions of reading it before I went. I didn’t. But I felt lured to it a few months ago. It’s a delicious piece of writing. For sure, you have to lean into her style and relax into the poetry that can at times disappear into the utterly obscure and abstract. But when you release from having to “get” it all, it’s an immersive experience that’s tantalising. There are some chapters – I wish I had made a note of which – that in themselves are masterful pieces of writing.
I often read nonfiction, but books like this remind me of the power of fiction and art in spiriting us away, transporting us to places, to feelings, to emotions that can bring more aliveness to our everyday lives. Our imaginations are immense. Books like this exercise them, strengthening our ability to be enlivened and entangled. It was also magical to revisit Kerala, a place defined by water.
This was beautiful. I've also been reflecting on how we speak about more-than-human beings; it's such a challenge when we only have gendered pronouns to work with, or else 'it' which just feels wrong to me ('it' is so inanimate).
I've been thinking about the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer and she suggests that we can use the word 'ki' to speak about our more-than-human kin (it is a shortening of kin, after all). It feels a bit awkward at first, but I've been practicing using that term myself and it feels nice as you get used to it. Just wanted to offer it to you as well :)
Love this. Thank you for allowing your words to flow so freely. It is so greatly appreciated.