A journal of commentary, narrative and poetry about navigating through life

the flame

River of Life

"Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, 
coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb..."

There is something about a river that fascinates me. There is power and peace in a river and there is time and timelessness in it. Both time and life, like a river, seem to flow by in shifting currents, while we stand fixed on the bank watching them slide quietly downstream, beyond our sight and on into eternity. Unstoppable, relentless, generation after generation, century after century, millennium after millennium, long after our bodies have become dust and are returned to the earth, the river will ever flow on toward the sea. Rivers are more than water, channel and mud; they are metaphors of our being and existence; they are representations of a powerful creator, a living symbol of eternity and the endless flow of life. I tried to capture this in the poem that follows.