With the world spinning and the stomach heaving it’s easy to overlook the Shining Self. Yet it’s right here, whirling like a dervish, inviting me to release, relax, weep, disappear altogether into its subterranean womb – into Rio Abajo Rio – the great river beneath the river of the world.
- Miriam Louisa, “This Unlit Light”
Dear Wise Women,
We return once again to the river.
As before, the inspiration for this week’s treasure trove arrived in a series of messages and experiences both direct and indirect. Last Sunday, I opened an email from Richard Rohr entitled “Money and Soul” and was captivated by his words:
“ I’m convinced that money and soul are united on a deep level. This truth is reappearing from the deep stream of wisdom traditions after centuries of almost total splitting and separation at the conscious level. There is un río profundo, a river beneath the river. The upper stream has always been money in all its forms, beginning with trading and bartering. The deeper stream is the spiritual meaning such exchanges must have for our lives. Money and soul have never been separate in our unconscious because they are both about human exchanges, and therefore, divine exchange, too.”
Richard Rohr’s words activated something in me and and I saw an image and felt a sensation of two rivers. Words cannot fully describe what I see and feel, but I can say that the one on top is shallow, choppy and turbulent and the one beneath is deep, calm, peaceful and…surprisingly… fierce so fierce that she catches my breath, this river, she is resolute, strong, and unwavering.
Could this imagery be yet another way to access, in every moment, the vital life force of our creator?
Is it our awareness alone that allows the river beneath to flow into the river above?
Could this be the river beneath be the river the Hopi Elder’s asked us to push off into?
(Recall our deep exploration of Hopi Elder’s Prophecy in our previous session: “There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.” View the entire prophecy here.)
These questions let me on a quest to explore this concept of “a river beneath the river” and was moved deeply to discover that “Rio Abajo Rio” is a name that Clarissa Pinkola Estes gives to describe the Wild Woman. I share with you a few passages to activate your awareness of the great river beneath it all.
May you allow your bones to marinate in the deep waters.
With love,
Patti
To embody the soul is to expand far beyond my personality, into the depths and the uniqueness of who I am. I am, you are, unique without being separate. Like all journeys, the unfolding of my individuation needs a foundation. I cannot expand, grow and evolve into the vastness of my spiritual nature, I cannot open to the presence of the divine, without this ground. I can make trips into these higher realms, I can climb up the ladder into the light and receive messages from on high. But I cannot embody this deeper intelligence, the boundless nature of this love, until I descend. Down into the body, into the feelings that live in the body, into the earth.
The part of us that I call soul loves this journey, and calls us to take each new step. Once we align ourselves with the evolutionary energy of the soul, it will call us relentlessly. This movement towards the truth of who we are, the truth of what life is, what reality is, is like a river that we enter. Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls it “the river beneath the river.” For a long time we live in the river on the surface of our lives, the river of survival, of false belonging, of all the contracts we agreed to, in order to belong. There is a current that runs much deeper and truer, and we can dive down and feel the pull of that. The river beneath the river moves to a different rhythm. It is not frantic, desperate, and full of noise. It flows and it is also full of stillness and presence. It is intelligent, loving and full of power.
- Shayla Wright,www.wideawakeheart.net
Always behind the actions of writing, painting, thinking, healing, doing, cooking, talking, smiling, making, is the river, the Río Abajo Río; the river under the river nourishes everything we make. In symbology, the great bodies of water express the place where life itself is thought to have originated. In the Hispanic Southwest, the river symbolizes the ability to live, truly live. It is greeted as the mother, La Madre Grande, La Mujer Grande, the Great Woman, whose waters not only run in the ditches and riverbeds but spill out of the very bodies of women themselves as their babies are born.
The Río Abajo Río, the river beneath the river, flows and flows into our lives. Some say the creative life is in ideas, some say it is in doing. It seems in most instances to be in a simple being. It is not virtuosity, although that is very fine in itself. It is the love of something, having so much love for something—whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land, or humanity—that all that can be done with the overflow is to create. It is not a matter of wanting to, not a singular act of will; one solely must. The creative force flows over the terrain of our psyches looking for the natural hollows, the arroyos, the channels that exist in us. We become its tributaries, its basins; we are its pools, ponds, streams, and sanctuaries. The wild creative force flows into whatever beds we have for it, those we are born with as well as those we dig with our own hands. We don’t have to fill them, we only have to build them.
Since the Wild Woman is Rio Abajo Rio, The river beneath the river, When she flows into us, we flow. If the aperture from her to us is blocked, we are blocked.
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
At The River Clarion
I don’t know who God is exactly.
But I’ll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.
Said the river I am part of holiness.
And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.
I’d been to the river before, a few times.
Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through all the traffic, the ambition
- Mary Oliver