“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless “refutation” of time. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself. But rivers are not just metaphors for life — they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on slaking its thirst for life with their waters in baptisms and funeral pyres, turbines and trade routes. Rivers were the lever by which the planetary thought process we call evolution lifted life itself out of the oceans to wing and paw and hoof the Earth, to forest it and flower it, to make it lush with minds and music.Art by Alessandro Sanna from The RiverA river, then, may be considered a life form itself, its aliveness not a calculation of the life it shores up but a kind of moral calculus drawn from the rights and responsibilities that grant an entity the dignity of personhood. This view, readily reflected in many native traditions, is entirely absent from the Western canon, absent from our legislature and our imagination. It is what Robert Macfarlane champions with passion and rigor in Is a River Alive? (public library) — a portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent (the rights of nature movement) but (because this is Robert Macfarlane) opening into the deepest recesses of the existential and the timeless: the measure and meaning of being alive. Extending an invitation to “imagine water otherwise” — and what is imagination itself if not the art of otherwise — he writes:For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning. We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water.With an eye to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s vivifying notion of a “grammar of animacy,” he adds:A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge — and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful phrase.Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River?As he travels the world to meet various rivers, he encounters and learns from their various defenders — an Indian teenage runaway from an abusive home turned steward and healer of all life, animated by a sense of equal kinship with millipede and mongoose and banyan tree; a “Chilean-Italian-British biologist-campaigner-filmmaker” covered in tattoos who is a kind of medium of mycology, sensing fungi by seemingly superhuman powers; an Innu poet and activist of slight build, decisive gestures, and oracular observations; an old friend with “a steel-trap intellect and a frankly supernatural memory,” capable of reciting a 400-line poem read in a newspaper twenty years earlier, “Leibniz in a hoodie, Pliny in sneakers.” They are all people who have chosen to give more the more they have lost, each of them fiercely devoted to their work of public service while navigating profound private sorrows and violations — the untimely death of a sister, the unjust death of a father, the plundering of a heritage, a room in the heart filled with clay where a beloved friend once lived. With each encounter and experience, new questions quicken, deepen, ferment in Robert’s mind:Where does mind stop and world begin? Not at skull and skin, that’s for sure.These are serious questions, hard questions, but they rise from the page haloed with tenderness, with spaciousness, with humor. Recounting his conversation with the young man in Chennai about death, lensed through the opening line of The Epic of Gilgamesh, he writes:Yuvan is silent for a while. Then he says: ‘There has been, I think, a narrowing of relatedness.’ I cannot tell if he is speaking of his sister’s death, or some vaster attenuation, or both. ‘To be is to be related,’ he says. ‘We must hugely widen the space of relations.’ He points skywards, out over the ocean. ‘The Pleiades. They’re my favourite constellation. It’s an open system, you see. Usually when stars form they do so in a globular cluster – there’s a main centre, and then smaller stars around. That’s how gravity works. But the Pleiades, well, the cluster has seven sisters and a weak centre, so it’s not concentrated around one point. It’s a differently political star system.’I laugh. ‘An anti-hierarchical feminist assemblage?’ ‘Exactly!’This growing, glowing sense of relatedness builds upon itself, so that eventually everything comes to mirror everything else, to elucidate and illuminate the glimmering threads of consanguinity and kinship that hold the web of life together. Art by Meredith Nemirov from her series Rivers Feed the TreesAnd then there are the rivers themselves, rendered in prose so incandescent it leaves you lit up for the inside, the world shimmering in the golden beam of this vast and generous mind. Kayaking down Quebec’s Mutehekau Shipu, or Magpie River, and into the lake it feeds, he casts the enchantment cast upon him:Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. House-sized boulders on the banks; time-falls from the rock faces above. Water blue-black and glossy in the deeper, calmer runs; peat-brown where it is stretched towards and away from rapids; churning green, gold and cream in the rapids and falls. Seen from above, from this height, the river appears static, and has the texture of impasto, gouache, as if smeared into place by a palette knife.[…]The vastness of scale is defeating to my English imagination, though. None of the metrics make sense. This lake’s length is the same distance as that between my home in Cambridge and central London. It holds a billion litres. It would take a year to drain. It holds a water-year.[…]We paddle all afternoon. As dusk approaches, we are all tiring. It is one of the tougher days I have known, physically speaking: a 4 a.m. start, then some twenty miles over flat water. Yet we seem barely to have moved within the vastness of the lake and its self-repeating patterns. The high sky steadily fades to milk at its edges, blue in its arches, soot at its summit. The air close to us greys, then charcoals.Life, in all its fragility and tenacity, comes fully alive as Robert finds himself a body in the body of a world both beautiful and brutal, insentient to the fate of any individual yet animated by a vast sentience that excludes nothing and holds in its broad open palm the destiny of everything:The precipitous west coast of the lake, along which we are skirting, offers little hospitality. Vast scree-slopes fan beneath shattered cliffs, their run-outs rubbled with giant blocks that tumble down to the shoreline and into the lake… We paddle on.Dark is falling. Wayne is far behind me now, invisible in the shadows. He is struggling. My own arms feel numb with use. I don’t know if I can make the next few miles… Then we round a promontory of rock and enter a new world. Here, three-hundred-foot-high cliffs rise vertically from the water. They are thylacine-striped in rust and black, and lightning-struck by quartzite. The wind suddenly drops to utter stillness. Water is sleek and calm as oil. Air is shocking in its silence after the day-long roar of the gale. The dusk is huge. I follow the line of the cliffs, keeping thirty feet or so out into the lake in case of rockfall. The water now seems molasses-thick and black as treacle. My paddle stirs it into spirals. The water-whispers of my blade echo back at me from the cliff walls. I feel the uncanny tranquillity that comes from a tired body and a tired mind. I feel I could paddle on into this never-ending dusk for ever.Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River?It is often when the mind tires that it loosens its grip on those habitual ways of perceiving that keep us from truly seeing, that make us mistak the parts attention sieves as salient for the whole. Through extreme pain and fatigue, through a near-death experience amid the rapids, Robert is ejected from the cerebral into the creaturely and through it thrust into the transcendent:Fifty yards ahead of me, the water is gold, and it is gold for as far as I can see down the lake. Just the light, surely? No, it can’t be the light, for the band of gold doesn’t correspond to the morning sun’s border with shadow. I reach the band, pass into it and understand. The gold is pollen. Billions and billions of pollen grains which have been knocked from the trees by the big southerly overnight and then blown out onto the water to form this gold-dust surface. Not light, then, but life.[…]Far above, the ongoing helical collision of the Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies, which began 4.5 billion years ago, spreads across the dark sky like pollen on water.Milky Way Starry Night by native artist Margaret Nazon from her series of celestial beadworkHe finds himself spun into the vortex of the question:It’s the crux that needs solving… Not “Who speaks for the river?” but “What does the river say?” These are two distinct questions. And while it’s relatively trivial to answer the first of them, it’s a philosophically immense task to answer the second.To this I would add a third: Who is listening to the river speak? To speak is to sound a personhood through to another. There is always a gorge between what is said and what is heard, because there is always an abyss between one person and another. The listener is implicated in the spoken, but can only explicate what is heard filtered through their particular consciousness, their singular experience of being alive. It is therefore no small task to be a skilled listener, which always means being a loving listener. Here is a virtuosic listener channeling what the river says to him so that we too may hear the song of life more clearly:This is a place where ghost-realms of times past and future overlap with one another, each transparent to the other, and I try to peer right and left into these laminar worlds but the river-mouth and its river-voices hold me in this one here and the river’s tongue now is the tongue of tongues, and the river’s song is the song of songs, slipshifting and shapesliding and veering, sung in spirals and stars and roars and other notes beyond hearing, and the voice sings what I cannot understand, however much I long to, and my heart is full of flow and I sit because I can no longer stand and then I have the dim but unmistakable sense at the shatter-belt of my awareness of an incandescent aura made of something like bears and angels but not bears and angels, something that is always transforming, and in that moment it is clear to me that this is the aura of the river-being… the question of life, which is not a question at all but a world.Couple Is a River Alive? with a kindred case for the life of a mountain by the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd, whose forgotten and fiercely beautiful writing Robert Macfarlane resurrected, then revisit Olivia Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). 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