The Day the Dams Crumble

Edward Abbey looked for a day when Glen Canyon Dam would crumble. Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes of day when dams both concrete and internal crumble....

"I think we should all raft down the mighty Colorado river in the Grand Canyon at least once in a lifetime.  I think sometimes of how it once was, if you could build by hand your own raft well enough, if you could fell the tree, if you could carve the oars, if you could provision yourself by hunting and fishing, if you had body strength enough, then the big water was all yours.


Nowadays, in actuality, in order to keep humans from overdoing it with various flim and flam in a pristine wild land, there is a lottery for rafting the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. Many many apply. Many. Few few are chosen. Very few. Desire to be with, in, near Nature right there, right now, is not enough. One has to have a permit. One has to have a license to ride the river, a paper made from a tree to run the rapids.


Yet, long ago, my grandmother told me that all the huge concrete dams holding the rivers of the world back, would someday crumble and fall down, and that then all the water would run free again... as it was meant to...as we were and are meant to.


Thus, I only know there is no lottery for the right to go crashing and bashing through the rapids of the psyche and life, there we still make our own conveyance, we carve the means to direct ourselves, we hunt and fish for the ideas and endeavors that will sustain... in us the big river of imagination and creativity are still ours...that with work, rather than time passing, tis true, all the dams we have ever built... will crumble and fall down, and all that is meant to flow through us, will flow through us.
for longing is like water that already knows the way ... and water alone can wear through stone."

~Clarissa Pinkola Estes