Learning How To Be Here

Memory, water, and the quiet work of re-membering

Lately, The Spacious Way has been evolving, and I suspect it may grow a little quieter for a while. Not because there’s less to say, but because I’m listening more closely. I’m in a season of learning about rivers, about my family, about how attention itself can be an act of faith - and it’s calling me toward something new: the first stirrings of a book I’ve been gathering.

That shift is changing how and when I write here. This space will still hold wonder, grief, sacred questions, humor, and a faith that doesn’t rush to resolve. But the posts may be fewer, and the tone more like short letters than longer, lofty essays.

Thank you for staying curious with me. I’m still here - just walking a little closer to the water, listening, and letting the river teach me what I need to know.

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As I stepped out onto the riverbank, I tried to remember the last time I had walked along a river. Searching the dusty corners of my mind, I could only muster a few blurry images. Frustrated, I shook off the attempt to conjure a childhood memory and kept walking.

The water’s edge was rocky, forcing my feet to bend and turn in unfamiliar ways to navigate the uneven ground. My eyes darted from one quiet eddy to the next, scanning for trout taking a break from the current. After some time, I found a place to sit and settled into the cold earth with my journal and sketching supplies.

Again, I wanted to remember - to summon a clear image of standing on a seashore, or fly-fishing with my dad on a pristine river. Instead, my memories came in reels - short, jumpy, lacking context, with an irritating gray film laid over the top. My attempts to recall anything clearly were about as successful as finding a steelhead trout that day.

Memory is a fickle thing. Our memories are not snapshots or tape recordings, perfectly preserved in their original state. They are malleable, flexible, and often unreliable. Even some of the most brilliant neurologists can’t fully explain how memory works.

I wasn’t sure whether I found this comforting or concerning. But as I walked along the river, something did return to me - actually, many things all at once.

They didn’t arrive as clear images or stories, but through my body. In the way my feet moved across the rocks, as if they already knew how to navigate the uneven terrain. In the way my eyes knew where to look for fish.

I could hardly remember the last time I was on a river.
But I did remember how to be on a river.

It was muscle memory that returned - a lived experience that had taken root long ago and grown quietly, grounding me in something real and embodied.

The river didn’t ask for my memories on a page, instead it invited me to re-member: connecting sinew with soul - soul with soil.

The land has been forming us long before we can remember it. We often know how to be in a place before we even can recall any specific experience. The body has a memory all of its own, just as the river has it’s own memory. The past lives in bones and rocks, shaping the way we move along this Earth.

Remembering is limited, but re-membering stretches between the ground to the cosmos, to the very Source of all that is.

We all drink from the same Sacred Watershed.