Heraclitus essay - A walk along the river book

I have walked to the river Kaw and along its banks upstream or downstream from the bridge that crosses from downtown to North Lawrence for something like twenty years. And to the water’s edge.

I have walked to the same river, but as Heraclitus said generations ago, not the same river.

Heraclitus is quoted using different words, but I have listened to what he said, and others like him who have paid attention to the ways of things, and in the way our species has done for a long time, I have tried to express truths in words.

But although some of us are adept with words and drawings and paintings, and in our modern era, with photographs, it is not so much what Heraclitus and others thought and said that seems so true, but reality itself.

We inhabit this reality, this universe - for me, this small space and a short amount of time. My actions, my thoughts, are like the fluff of a milkweed pod.

This is by no means meant to minimize who we humans are, but to help us recognize our place.

In our modern era, we are inundated with new things and so very much information about ourselves and what appears, on first glance, to be about everything.

I’d like to think that if Heraclitus were here with us, he would have slipped through the crowds, taking some notice, but coming to a river like this one, or any number of flowing streams of water that have the qualities that we call a river, he would have walked along it or paused and wondered about what was true.

Now to say that a word like ‘true’ is a little archaic is not an insult, but quite the contrary, at least in the way I sometimes think. I believe that there is a truth and meaning in reality, a reality that also includes us. And while it seems to also be the case that we – our conscious beings – make up some of the meanings as we go along in our tangled ways, we clearly don’t do all of this out of whole cloth.

There is a whole lot of reality out there and a huge amount that came before us – before I ever came to walk to this river.

Besides what others before me have said and what relatively little I have experienced within my consciousness, there appears to be something we call truth and meaning – and those are only our words for something – something - that is out there, outside of us, in the universe.

Perhaps I have taken too long to restate what might seem obvious - what, after all, has been said with elegance and clarity by many others. But this, now, is my perspective.

I suppose I could mine Heraclitus’ words for more pyrite and maybe some real gold, but it should also be apparent that I am not the same man who walked to this river twenty years ago – but of course I am.

Writing is about using words, and like any craftsman or craftswoman, I want to use them well, to be able to take some pride in my work, but my intent is to point toward the reality that is outside my descriptions and my responses to what is. Except for things like buildings and roads and rockets that fly up into space, we did not make this reality, although we have shaped it some.

What we do make, we craft out of matter and energy. We do not create. We only discover rules we did not write.

Some of what I think I have come to understand about all this has come through the process of trying to look at the same thing on a different day. Or to break this down, I look at the same river at different times of the day. Or in different weather. Or I look at different places on the same river. Or the same place from a different perspective.

This is merely the empirical method, but without the rigor of science. It is the simple, almost naïve, holding one thing up to the next - comparing, contrasting - using one thing to take the measure of something else. Heraclitus would understand exactly what I am talking about.

And here, finally is my point. I want, in this book, only to show you a little of what I have looked at.

But please understand me when I say that these photos and words merely represent a part what I have seen and experienced. Reality is out there. Time continues to move on.

I have captured an idea, a vision, here and there. Souvenirs  from a particular time and place.

But truth and beauty, mystery and meaning, run wild and  untamed, even on this trampled and channeled stretch of river. Those realities are what I have sought, what I still seek to comprehend.

When I am done thinking, I walk. And sometimes, when I walk, out of the corner of my eye, a bit of the universe winks at me and I fall in love with life all over again.