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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Rivers

Despite St. Patrick's Day COVID restrictions, Chicago River runs green -  ABC News 

This picture makes me sick.

Every Spring since 1962, the Journeyman Plumbers Union, Local 130, pour chemicals into the Chicago River to dye it green.

This they call a “tradition.”

It's not a tradition; it's a desecration. It's pollution, physical and spiritual.

A River is a sacred being. A River has rights. A River is our kin.

Search "river green Chicago" and take a look at what the press has to say about it. That, too, will make you sick. Where are the voices raised against this arrogance, this hubris?

Our ancestors worshiped Rivers (including, be it noted, the Boyne). Some of us still do.

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  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Of course, even vegetable-derived compounds can be toxic in sufficient concentrations. Think of neo-nicotinoids. What dismays me
  • Mike W
    Mike W says #
    I agree, not a great idea to dump coloring into a living system. At least since 1966 it’s a vegetable based dye powder (Mental Fl
  • Meredith Gladwell
    Meredith Gladwell says #
    Yeah it's pretty sickening. It's a pity we can't do this in the grand ol' US of A... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/16
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    If only.

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 A Paris Guide: The River Seine

When's the last time that you heard an article in praise of a pagan goddess on the radio?

I've always liked NPR's France correspondent Eleanor Beardsley. (Yes, I'll admit to riffing off of the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" whenever I hear her byline.) With her quirky voice and delicious sense of irony, she strikes me as something of an American Alistair Cooke during his "Letters from America" days, affectionately explaining the curious ways of France and the French to an American audience.

She lives in Paris, and this morning had a sweet little piece (“France's Seine River is a Place of Solace During Covid-19 Pandemic”) about the River Seine, and how it—perhaps I should say she—has helped her through a dark year of lock-down.

The Seine is a goddess. (In the Celtic world, rivers are female.) In Gallo-Roman times she was called Sequana, which is where her modern name comes from, and was widely known as a goddess of healing. Pilgrims came to her healing shrine at the source of the Seine from as far away as the Mediterranean and the English Channel.

She still heals. Beardsley talks about how walking along the Seine has offered her a welcome encounter with the natural world through a pent-up year of pandemic in an over-built urban environment.

The goddess Sequana, in fact, helped save Notre Dame cathedral during the recent catastrophic fire. Half the water used to extinguish that fire came—via fire-boat—from Dea Sequana Salvatrix, the River Seine, the goddess that flows through Paris.

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A Promise to the Ferryman, or: How I Ended Up Sitting (Literally) Bare-Assed in the Snow One Midwinter's Eve

At the big public Samhain that year, everybody had paid a coin to the Ferryman to cross the River.

Obviously, money collected under such circumstances can't be put to just any use. After the ritual, we donated the bulk of it to the local AIDS hospice. (That seemed appropriate.) But the foreign coins and the gaming arcade tokens (talk about cheap) called for a different—if still respectful—disposal.

As it happens, one of the great rivers of the world flows through our city, so I volunteered to take the coins down to the Mississippi and throw them in.

Well, I put it off and I put it off. (It was a snowy year, if you want my lame-ass excuse.) Suddenly it was Midwinter's Eve, and I still hadn't disposed of the coins.

“This can't wait,” I thought. “It really has to be done tonight; tomorrow will be too late.”

So after our Mother Night ritual and feast, I drove down to the site where, 1000 years ago, a winter village once stood on the East Bank of the River. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Old People who lived there buried their dead across the River on the West Bank.

Being a warmish Yule that year, I was wearing my kilt: commando, of course. (You know what they say: With underwear, it's just a skirt.)

The warm weather had given the snow a slick crust. Just as I was negotiating the last snowbank down to the River....

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  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Thanks, Erin. I think of it as ham on wry.
  • Erin Lale
    Erin Lale says #
    lol. I really enjoy your sense of humor.

Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs

"Braids, tapestries, and currents in the river show us the way again and again--it cannot be one clear way or another, it has got to be both ways and together."

--Eila Carrico, The Other Side of the River

...
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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Sacred River of the Witches

If you look at a map of England, you'll see on the southwestern side of the island, between Cornwall and Wales, a large waterway reaching inland from the Atlantic. This is the Estuary (in Witch, it would be “Firth”) of the River Severn.

The Severn, Britain's longest river, is traditionally considered a “female” river, its patron deity a goddess.

In its valley and throughout its watershed there dwelt, some 1300 years ago, the Anglo-Saxon tribe known as the Hwicce, from whom, some would say, derive the witches of today. And indeed, plenty of witches still live along the Lady Severn, though most of us now live elsewhere.

In any given landscape, the names of the largest rivers will always give access to the oldest reachable underlying linguistic substratum. (Think of the Mississippi, Ojibwe for “Big River.”) And so it is for the Severn.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Old Ways Endure

A rural Anabaptist commune in mid-20th century Manitoba seems an unlikely time and place for a sacrifice to a river.

But that is the story that journalist Mary-Ann Kirby tells in her autobiography I Am Hutterite.

Some memories, it would seem, live long indeed.

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Bridges: Some Reflections on the Nature of Sacrifice

At 6:05 p. m. on Wednesday, August 1, 2007, the I-35 bridge over the Mississippi in Minneapolis collapsed. Thirteen people were killed.

Thirteen. On Lammas Eve.

Of many rivers, it is said that they require a life every year. The Mississippi, our “strong brown god” (Tom Eliot) takes many more than that. Last year, here in the metro alone, it was 17.

In the old days, they say, they used to offer to rivers. Nowadays, we mostly don't. But the sacrifices continue, as they will while ever the world endures. Willing or unwilling, they offer themselves, because sacrifice is in the nature of things.

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  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Somehow in those moments when our lives touch the Big Things, one can only sit back and wonder. My gods.
  • Celeste Lovecharm
    Celeste Lovecharm says #
    My husband crossed that bridge just moments before that happened. He had decided to leave a few minutes early that day. Otherwise

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