“All living is meeting.”–Martin Buber
Love is the river I swim in.
I think this is an appropriate metaphor, because I’m not a very good swimmer. I learned to swim when I was eight years old, in the Putumayo River in southern Colombia.
The river beach where I was baptized was covered with rocks.
As the Putumayo passes the town of Puerto Asís, it courses fiercely toward its eventual joining with the Amazon. I was baptized in the Putumayo, along with two of my sisters. When my turn came, I waded out to where my dad stood with another man from our church. The water was just over my waist. They grasped my elbows and shoulders tightly as they leaned me back into the hungry brown current. When my feet left the ground, my body was immediately and comically pulled to the surface, my toes pointing downstream.
The river beach where I was baptized was covered with rocks, and so was the bed of the Putumayo at that point. We had to keep our tennis shoes on for baptism as we did for swimming, tied firmly so the water would not pull them off.
Swimming in a river with a powerful current doesn’t lend itself to the refining of stroke techniques. It does lend itself to floating, if you are content to go downstream. And swimming across or against the current develops your strength. On our family’s river-beach excursions, my sisters and I found it amusing to start from some distance out and try to swim back to the beach in a straight perpendicular line. The river inevitably forced its own geometry on us, pulling us downstream so we came ashore east of our intended destination.
Once in college I swam in a pool with a friend who gave swim lessons to children. She tried to help me with pointers about breathing and how to move my arms efficiently. I realized that to retrain myself for pool swimming I would need to start over in a course for beginners. It’s something I’ve never pursued.
But I swim in love’s river every day. I can’t see how it holds me, but it does. It imposes its own geometry and physics on my life, inevitably thwarting my sentimental intentions. It is deep and brown like the Putumayo, and its fierce current is taking me somewhere.
Note: the photo is a 2017 view of the Putumayo, downriver (east) of the city of Puerto Asís.
Ruth Goring 