When I became a river guide, I found my place, my home. It was something that felt like a comfortable set of clothes.
Yet it started in complete terror, like being thrown from the womb with a complete knowledge of all the misery in the world before feeling your mother's touch, and without knowing life's joy, pleasure and love.
Unlike conventional sports where skills are put upon you by those with expectations to be achieved or you are a disappointment to be discarded, the river had no expectations, no thought of abandoning me, just the constant flow that seduced, enticed and challenged me to find my harmony with it or be left to never know.
When I run a river, the spiritual and physical merge and become concentrated within the thin space that I run. All things fall away and I am the center- not the center of anyone's attention or the center of importance, but at the center of the essence of who I am and what I was, am, can and will be.
While those years riding the waters of the Snake and the Salmon are long behind me, when I dream, there is almost always a river, always a girl, always a boat, always a rapid and I am in the thick of it, and while others would wake up in the sweat of a nightmare, when I wake up, I do so with the longing that the dream continue and having the expectation to return.
So what is that paddle in my hand? It is the tool that allowed me to fall in love with the river and with life and it is the tool that allowed me to access my soul.
Loren M. Lambert © October 28, 2015
Yet it started in complete terror, like being thrown from the womb with a complete knowledge of all the misery in the world before feeling your mother's touch, and without knowing life's joy, pleasure and love.
Unlike conventional sports where skills are put upon you by those with expectations to be achieved or you are a disappointment to be discarded, the river had no expectations, no thought of abandoning me, just the constant flow that seduced, enticed and challenged me to find my harmony with it or be left to never know.
When I run a river, the spiritual and physical merge and become concentrated within the thin space that I run. All things fall away and I am the center- not the center of anyone's attention or the center of importance, but at the center of the essence of who I am and what I was, am, can and will be.
While those years riding the waters of the Snake and the Salmon are long behind me, when I dream, there is almost always a river, always a girl, always a boat, always a rapid and I am in the thick of it, and while others would wake up in the sweat of a nightmare, when I wake up, I do so with the longing that the dream continue and having the expectation to return.
So what is that paddle in my hand? It is the tool that allowed me to fall in love with the river and with life and it is the tool that allowed me to access my soul.
Loren M. Lambert © October 28, 2015
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