Stumbling upon Divinity

Oswegatchie River @Lynne Buchanan

All Rights Reserved, Image Watermarked by Digimarc

"To trace the history of a river or a raindrop...is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.  In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again."--Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, The Universe, Home (www,gretel-ehrlich.com)

I came upon this quote while reading a compilation prepared by the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, as I was preparing for my upcoming exhibition at the South Florida Museum that will open on March 14th.  Gretel's words touched a chord in me and reminded me of this photograph I took in upstate New York after working with Jan Phillips (www.janphillips.com) this past fall.  I love the way the water splits at the top, coming in from divergent sources that we assume were one though we can't see that far back; then merges, divides, and merges again.  It parallels the way we were originally all one and then continually disconnect and reconnect with each other, the natural world, and the divine within and without.  When we stumble upon scenes such as this, this process is concretely illustrated in an exquisite manner.  It is hard for me not to be touched by divinity in these moments, and when I experience the divine in nature like this I feel it in my own self.