Narrated Essay: In the Realm of the River

on the power of negative ions, hidden valleys, and imaginal reciprocity

You’re invited next September 20-26, 2026, to The Tender Harvest, a week-long retreat amidst the golden hues and organic bounty of the world-class Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland. Each day will feature yoga, meditation, farm-to-table meals, and curated excursions—plus ample time for rest, self-nurturance, and imagination.

“Alongside the careful realism of [Hilma af Klint’s] herbal specimens, af Klint inscribed diagrams explaining their spiritual lives. For the European thimbleweed, a hot-and-cold Star of David; for the goat willow, a broken hexagram; for the black poplar, a yin-yang bullseye representing its ‘resistance to unite the astral and the mental.’” -NYT Credit: Committee on Drawings and Prints Fund and gift of Jack Shear, via Museum of Modern Art, New York

The sound of flowing water soothes most nervous systems, but particularly those acclimatized to the desert, and particularly upon waking. I have struggled with sleep disturbances for much of my adult life, so the metabolic satisfaction of a good night’s rest is a rarity. But twice last month, I found myself the grateful recipient of river medicine—first while visiting friends at their cabin in the Pecos Wilderness, and again while teaching at Beyul Retreat, a guest ranch along the Frying Pan River, a tributary of the Roaring Fork River east of Aspen.

What is river medicine? It’s like this: surrounded by tall, sappy pines, I find myself one early morning in the atmospheric valley between sleeping and waking, an integrative field of frequencies and forms. You know the place. I do not know for sure if the river, by some charm of consciousness, streams into my dreamscape and stirs me awake, or if it was the dream that pulsated forward into the matrix of a new day. What I know for sure is that a bright, hydrous intelligence moves through my body, clarifying and tonifying in ripples and waves, calming neurons and glial cells in their watery beds, clearing layers of baked-in tension like grit loosened from a soaking pan.

For a time, I float above the push of the day, appearing and disappearing and reappearing to myself. And, in the wake of hours that follow, I noticed a quiet reverberation—an elemental answer that quells a wordless, needful thirst.

Science offers a partial explanation for such medicine. Water has a high dielectric constant, meaning it reduces the electrostatic attraction between charged particles, which helps substances like salt crystals separate and dissolve more easily.

I would also propose that water’s properties of solubility, absorption, and transmission apply to its natural ability to clean and balance the bioenergetic forces of being human. Water cleans the body, mind, and heart.

When a river twists and turns, it releases negative ions into the air. Molecules spill over rocks and tumble forward, rushing and colliding, breaking apart, and thereby transferring electrons and charging the surrounding air. Microscopically, this process is dynamic—even violent. But I find comfort in this science of revitalization. New fluid structures can form when old ones give way; beyond the tinkering, turmoil, and devastation of the moment, we too can hope for vital transformation.

Years ago, I read a New York Times article called “Where Heaven and Earth Come Closer,” in which journalist Eric Weiner wrote about “thin places,” locations where the gap between the ordinary and extraordinary—or, better yet, transordinary—thins out.

“Thin” seemed a strange choice to describe where the air thickens with meaning. But Celts and early Christians held that a small and specific distance, like three feet, separates heaven and earth—and that distance dissolves in “places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments [we] loosen [our] death grip on life, and can breathe again.”

Many a thin place has been built by human hands. Early in my career, I worked for the United Nations Foundation in collaboration with UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre, and developed the sensible habit of visiting the most treasured cathedrals, temples, and sanctuary sites wherever I found myself in the world. Jama Masjid in Delhi, Sacré-Cœur in Paris, Tirta Empul in Bali, Newgrange in Ireland, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem: each has a distinct energetic signature, a resonance born of its purpose and an accumulation of prayers concentrated in the surrounding air.

But thin places are more often found than made. Mountains, canyons, coral palaces—they are monuments to mysticism and reminders of our size before nature. As Weiner writes, “Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us—or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves.”

In this sense, thin places evoke qualities of alchemy and revelation. In traveling to Beyul Retreat, I recalled how the Vajrayana Buddhist term “beyul” refers to hidden valleys blessed by enlightened teachers, sanctuaries where the land itself is animate. A beyul imparts the wisdom that rivers, trees, and even rocks are not objects but mandalas, living altars—ineffable, receptive, and intricate in their aliveness.

Aptly named, Beyul Retreat is a valley where the boundary between perception and imagination feels more permeable. The land electrifies with new growth as summer approaches: dandelion confetti bursts open in the meadows, aspen trees shimmy and shimmer, and fresh sage scents the air. Each morning, as the river’s murmur moves through the valley, calypso orchids bloom in the shade while the pointed ears of silver fox pups perk up from behind cool, wet stones.

In the imaginal realm of childhood, there are many beyuls, many thin places. There are fern groves and swallow lairs, stars nestled in apple cores and galaxies in lightning bugs, and lobe-handed sycamore leaves at the wild end of the yard.

“The world is not made of objects; it is a communion of subjects,” writes Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. We tend to think of nature as speaking in symbols, but its directness transmits rather than approximates. “To enter the imaginal realm is to give permission to the ineffable within us, to allow the world to speak through our senses, our dreams, our longings.”

To commune with the subjectivity of the world is to listen with tender presence, to notice the fundamental exchange of breath and vital circumstance that underpins our existence; to allow for a metamorphosis of our attention; to discover strange and wonderful ways of joining the conversation. Like us, aspens drink water and eat light. They possess an innate instinct to protect their lives. And have you noticed the dark spots resembling eyes on their smooth, pale bark? They are scars left behind when the tree sheds lower branches that receive less sunlight. Their scars become eyes. Now the tree’s watchfulness turns in our direction: this is one way the forest offers us its attention.