A Return to the River

After a stretch spent wrestling with the heavy machinery of cultural narratives and the intricacies of our birdwatching moment, I felt a sudden, sharp pull to return to the source. This past week, I drove out to the Illinois River near Havana to intercept the mid-continent snow goose migration.

The conditions were not “ideal” in any traditional sense—17 degrees, a stinging wind, and a landscape still held in winter’s frozen grip. But standing there, watching geese rise out of the ice, I realized that my mind was trying to “fix” the river and “understand” the geese with data and history. The Tao teaches us that the mind often overlooks the plain truth of the moment in its desperation to categorize it.

The geese aren’t a problem to be solved or a spectacle to be captured; they are a manifestation of the Great Return—the fundamental pulse of existence. The following poem is what happened when I stopped trying to analyze the flight and simply tried to become the space they passed through. It is a record of a pause, a gathering of energy, and a reminder that even in an era of imbalance, the universe is at peace.

All we have to do is notice.

A Return to the River

The river is corralled, but the geese weren’t told. They fill the sky with wild shouting, as if the world were still exactly as it should be.

I walked into the cold to find them, my face stinging in the wind, ice gripping the edges of the water— winter not yet finished with its work. The geese do not seem to mind. They rest and rise, rest and rise, talking constantly in a harsh, tender language: the sound of relatedness, the sound of knowing where you are going and who is going with you.

They are beautiful, noisy, problematic, emblematic, eternal, and ephemeral. They are all these things at once. Just like us. Just like life.

Above them, clouds drift—vast, white rivers in the sky. Below them, the water remembers how to move. And between, the geese ride the air as if it were nothing, as if returning were the simplest thing in the world.

I used to think I needed to understand them. Now I only want to be with them. I want to rest my head against that pulse, to settle into the down and be consumed by wildness. But standing in the cold, I see they do not care about my questions. They are busy being geese— which is to say, busy being alive, busy belonging to the long journey north.

I have wanted them in three ways. The first: to hold them in my hands, the heavy weight of that old conversation between breath and no breath. The second: to freeze them in a frame, pinning beauty to the page as if the moment wouldn’t insist on moving. And third: to stand very still and let them fly through me, becoming the space they use to reach spring.

They were here before me; they will be here after. And right now, in this cold that makes my heart ache, they are gloriously, impossibly here. And so am I.

All afternoon I watched the energy gathering— in the shifting clouds, in the restless water, in the geese rising. Winter holds on with a frozen grip while spring presses up from underneath. Any day now, the release will come. The warm sun. The breaking open.

I want to flow with a movement governed by something older than desire. But today, we wait together— me in my coat, them in their feathers, all of us knowing, without knowing how we know, that the light is shifting.

I stand quietly until the voices carry me. The world is always doing this: calling and answering, moving and resting, preparing and releasing.

I am part of this, whether I understand it or not. The universe is at peace. All I have to do is notice.