Take Me to the River.

One of my favorite metaphors for life is the river. It’s meandering and it pulls up muck as it goes along. In Chapter 5 of The Artist’s Way, “Recovering a Sense of Possibility,” Cameron writes “the shift to spiritual dependency is a gradual one,” and for me it’s taken years. If there is one thing I really need to work on, it’s “letting go and letting God.” If we look at the metaphor of a river, we acquire the feeling of moving along in the current of life, of sometimes hitting the bank or getting stuck on a rock, of being pushed down into the depths and rising to the surface, of flowing along, in our meandering way, sifting through the debris and finding the gold. Our lives are transformed in this gradual way. We discover trust and the ability to recreate ourselves. When I searched my manuscript for 30 Perfect Days, I found that I'd used the river metaphor multiple times. I didn't know it was so part of me. Maybe that's why I've always said I'd love to live in the Cuyahoga Valley--the trees are the sentinels that watch over the freedom created by the river's tumbling and reverberating journey.