Lately, my husband and I’ve been out walking together.  Two walks that mix in my memory are a women’s march a couple years ago (Womxn’s it was named in my city) and a day spent strolling the newly revealed riparian banks of the Elwha, a peninsula rain forest river that again, after 100 years, flows unimpeded by dams: from its alpine mountains down and out through a broadening mouth into the Pacific.

 

I realize now the feelings stirred in me from being within the human flow of the march are the same stirred by walking the newly exposed riparian ground of the river: feelings of an opening possible; of a chance in a revealed ground once underwater, denied light, held dormant.

 

For me, an OldPromise is blooming in the riparian banks of that river & that march.  A yearning lean toward light and life.

 

I don’t forget, do not overlook the predatory, invasive species immediately colonizing the newly exposed mud banks of the Elwha.  I know it took the careful, observant labor & time of the river keepers to pull out by the roots, one by one, those fast-growing opportunists and plant in their place native growth.  I understand it is not enough to only reveal the mud. Cultivating care is needed to encourage life from long submergence.

 

In the flow of that march was a woman-multitude of currents, temperatures, stridencies & shout outs that came and went, much different and sometimes contradictory but welcoming witnessed, still.

 

Our walking was not a toleration - not an indulgent motherhood – but a comprehension of this necessary mashup given flow from the centrifugal attraction that flooded the differences between us as we shared the comfort & encouragement of our invisibility made visible in the light shining from/on our plural mass.

 

My husband and I recently checked back in on The Elwha.  The return of life in the riparian zone has begun; a return of a nurturing tributary-ness rippling out to all the plants and animals on and on into the forest. Our chain of interdependent life.  All being in relation.

 

That day, wewomen all walking together, the relational meaning held, moving, changing, in the flow of the whole.  Our once submerged ground, revealed.