This is an essay I originally shared back in September 2023. Since that time this publication has grown significantly. As summertime chaos takes over our lives (and I continue to root myself in my real, messy, embodied life) I will be intermittently sharing some of my favorite essays, especially those that may be new to a number of readers.
For my paid subscribers, I’ll be taking a summer hiatus from my bibliophilia1 book recommendation series. Please know how much I appreciate your continued support.
This is an essay about a river that changed its mind, and how the curve of the Cross taught me about the inevitable (unpredictable, sometimes painful) turns in life.
I hope you enjoy!
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F99fd8506-476f-4e7f-8bff-92f2d7261a56_4080x3072.jpeg)
The Mississippi River flows 2,340 miles south from its headwater, Lake Itasca, in northern Minnesota, to the Mississippi River Delta in the Gulf of Mexico.
It is the thirteenth largest river discharge in the world, cutting its way through ten states. Its beginnings are earlier than memory, largely shaped by the Laurentide Ice Sheet of the most recent Ice Age.
In 1846 the river changed its mind. Suddenly it veered away from the settlement of Reverie, Tennessee, leaving a portion of Tipton County, Tennessee in Arkansas, separated from the rest of the state by the new river channel. This sort of event is called an avulsion, a term in sedimentary geology and fluvial geomorphology with a poetic definition - “rapid abandonment.”
In Lake Itasca you can roll your pants up and feel the river flow over your knees, where it is about 3 feet deep. By the time you reach New Orleans the Mighty Mississippi gapes open, a yawning black stillness, 200 feet down.
As a result of hurricanes or earthquakes, the river has done a remarkable thing. It has run backwards. The earliest known occurrence was in 1812, and most recently in 2012, when Hurricane Isaac sent the water swirling up like a drawn breath, scurrying back to its source.
Mark Twain marked his whole life by this river when he called his memoir, Life on the Mississippi.
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.”
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
So this is a remarkable river, a mythic River, “the Father of Waters.”
But I didn’t know it when I saw it.
A bustling farmers market - golden raspberries and sheep’s milk,2 rosemary potato bread - and the Mill Museum, built on the castle-like ruins of the Washburn A Mill.3 These sites held my attention. The River was present, but rather unremarkable, calm and quiet, separating the banks of the Twin Cities, St. Paul and Minneapolis. I couldn’t hear the roar of St. Anthony’s Falls or the long forgotten churn of the water-powered flour mills.4
Ignorant of geography, I had landed in this Midwestern city with little knowledge of where I was, of the prehistoric grooves that had etched their way into a gorge, narrow and steep, defining industry and creating prosperity until the sudden precipice of the Great Depression.
It was only the next morning, driving to St. Paul’s Cathedral that we looked at Google Maps, and said, Is that the Mississippi River? Somehow it hadn’t occurred to us. I knew we were in the land of 10,000 lakes. I hadn’t thought of the River.
At the Art Institute5 I came across a striking crucifix, a shock of white against a stark black cross. I read the placard -
"The figure was carved out of an unusually large tusk of ivory, which determined the C-shaped movement that underscores the body’s suffering.”
Looking at Christ on the cross, you can see the arch of His body, and within that body, the distinct curve of an Elephant’s tusk. You can imagine the artist, who we only know as “the Master of Guadalcanal,” choosing to work with the bend in his material, to mold Jesus’s body into a more radical stretch of agony.
After all, there is no working against it. Ivory has a measured hardness of 35 on the Vickers scale6, exceeding that of bone.
When I learn of our proximity to the Mississippi I think again of this Ivory Jesus. I think of the curves and bends in the river, of the floods and the hurricanes and the earthquakes.
I think of water playing with the laws of gravity, running backward.
I think of Father Louis Hennepin discovering the roar of the Owámniyomni7 and how he must have tripped over this beautiful name, if he knew it at all.8
Norman Maclean wrote9, “eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”
The Ivory Jesus I see on that crucifix is one of rapid abandonment. Of Avulsion. Of contorting His body to the prophesied and the mythic and the Justice-demanded curves of the River.10
“A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden.”11
Water defines us. The human brain and heart are composed of 73% water. The source of so much that we think of as solid and unchanging, of memory and love and knowledge, has much in common with the inconsistencies of the River.
Dip your hand in water. What do you feel? It’s gentle, parting easily for your fingers.
Now slap the water, hard.
It hurts.
They say hitting water at high speed is like hitting concrete. It is as immovable as rock.
Or as that tusk of Ivory.
My mind searches desperately for narratives. So now the curves of the Mississippi and the C-shaped bend of the Ivory Crucifix are all tangled up in my mind, telling me there are always turns, abandonments, improbabilities.
The Water is a place of life. The Mississippi is home to 260 different species of fish, the source of sustaining sediment, with banks that invite us to build homes, businesses, entire cities.
But the Water is also a place of dangerous undertows and ripping currents, of floods and rapids. The Mississippi claims many accidental drowning victims every year. It is both a beautiful and an awful thing.
The Hebrew word Yirah can be translated either as “fear” or “awe.”
These two words seem so different to me - fear and awe, horror and wonder, terror and comfort. But perhaps after all they are the same, or at the very least, two sides of something True.
The theologian Simone Weil wrote -
“The contradictions the mind comes up against—these are the only realities: they are the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.
Weil also found the only true way of worship, of confronting this ultimate Contradiction to be Attention12 - to pay attention.
And as the poet Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
I could tell you I spent all morning looking out at the river, worshipping its Source and Beginnings, thinking on Crucifixes and Angels and the turn of Ivory. That I paid attention.
But none of that happened.
I was far too busy chasing an enthusiastic little girl around the zoo, riding carousels, nursing a baby, napping with said-baby in my arms13, trying to hear the angelic choir at St. Paul’s over the near-constant toddler prattling, running through rainstorms, talking with an old friend over glasses of wine.
This, too, I think must be a form of attention, because if Attention is a form of Love (and I think it is), this must have been some sort of Devotion.
It may be ironic to have found some turn toward Attention when I hardly noticed the River at all, only learning its history and its profundity after the fact, but perhaps this too speaks to our inherent Contradictions.
Curves of Ivory, Curves of the River. Bend, bend.
The Hardness of Water, the Softness of Water.
“The Uses Of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver, Thirst
Some favorites from the past, in the meantime: for postpartum/bedbound, when you need an escape, for homesick horse lovers.
Higher in fat, low in lactose, absolutely delicious and excellent as coffee creamer or on its own (and very much toddler approved)
The site of the “The Great Mill Disaster” of 1878 - a spark ignited airborne flour dust, creating an explosion that claimed 18 lives, leveling the mill.
In 1880 Washburn A was grinding enough flour for 12 million loaves of bread a day.
The Dakota name of the Falls - literally “whirlpool”
He named them in his own tongue, settling on his patron saint, St. Anthony of Padua, patron of lost things.
A River Runs Through It
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God.” Revelation 22:1
Genesis 20:10
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” - Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Easier said than done now that she’s 22+lb.
Lovely reflections. Mary Oliver is my absolute favorite!