Fluvial Geomorphology of the Soul

Change happens little by little.

An impact is made gradually, one wave at a time: lap, lap, lap, like the erosion on the fragment of oyster shell I’m thumbing on this rainy full-moon morning. It came from the shores of Bainbridge Island, just on the other side of the Sound, an oasis accessible only by maritime transport. My mom gifted me the shell on my birthday; I’ve stared at it for over a month, but only now did I realize its meaning. 

Each groove is the saline imprint of a wave, immortalizing oceanic motion: the Earth’s constant upheaval encapsulated in the gentle rise and fall of a Pacific Northwest tide, imprinted upon the husk of an evacuated mollusk. The shifting of land masses, the shaping of worlds, demonstrated in small movements.  

He studied the slow impact of water upon land over time. It was something I’d never really thought about before, despite spending my whole life surrounded by the Sound, the lakes, the sea. I had learned about erosion in school, I guess, but through his eyes, I came to see its power, majestic alpine landscapes springing from aqueous movement—sometimes quickly, in massive environmental events, but mostly little by little, through glacial melt, gurgling streams, falling rain, sea levels dropping and rising. You can’t see it happening; it takes millennia, but time is a construct, so what’s a few thousand years? 

The most majestic peak in the Pacific Northwest—Mount Rainier, Tahoma, the Great Spirit I commune with in the dawn—was formed in a similar way, by liquid flowing, though in this case, it was liquid-hot magma. A composite volcano slowly arose from simmering lava, like a sleepy child stretching as they rise from their bed, building almost imperceptibly through intermittent flow and the occasional explosive event, just like humans build a life. It happens a tiny ripple at a time, and then one day, it’s there. 

Sometimes, we look around at what our waves have formed, and we don’t like the patterns we find, chafing against the grooves that have been worn from all this gradual movement. But it will never be this way for long. The forces of nature are always continuing to work upon matter, and through careful consideration, we can make decisions that shape the flow in a certain direction.

He studied the slow impact of water upon land over time, and that tells you everything you need to know about him. Deliberate and measured, ambling and ever-empirical, making quiet impact in small moments. This approach was sometimes comforting, often beautiful, but other times, seemed passively self-destructive: letting the glacial meltwaters of life wash over, allowing things to just happen to him, including me.

I studied anthropology, so my approach was different: documenting and interpreting the ways in which humans experience their environment and each other, lurking in the shadows, a participant observer in my own life. But sometimes I inflicted sudden, chaotic action upon my environment, because I’m also a storyteller who could never seem to help getting meta, and my participation shaped my observation, and it took me a long time to separate the effects of what I’d caused from what was already there. If he could use a little more action, I could use a little more flow.

Fluvial geomorphology is the study of flowing water: not that which stands and stays stagnant, but water that flows, in feminine expression. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said “no man ever steps in the same river twice; it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” And this principle of constant change is the same as it was when he uttered those words back in 544 B.C. 

Ancient traditions described the world as shaped by a Biblical flood, a cataclysmic event of collective baptism. As the 18th century approached, people didn’t understand erosion, the power of flowing water. To quote a 2007 ecology textbook, they thought that streams gurgled through mountain valleys “because the valleys were already there, not because the stream cut the valley.” 

But at about the same time, the Age of Enlightenment was arising. A new generation of scientific rationalists discovered that, in fact, it was water that shaped the landscape—not the other way around. Rather than viewing the world as chaotically formed by isolated, explosive events, the modern discipline of geomorphology focuses on slow movements in systems of interconnection: “the linkages among channel, floodplain, network, and catchment.”

These varying riverine features give rise to diverse habitats that birth equally disparate organisms, just like human civilizations shape societies and people. In either discipline, geology or anthropology, studying the interrelationships tells us all we need to know. To quote that textbook again, understanding how living things change in response to environmental influences “can in turn be used to avoid unwise management choices” and create healthier environments. 

Geologists use stratigraphic analyses, comparisons of landforms, and statistical approaches to understand the way the Earth was formed. Those of us who critique culture analyze social stratification, compare alternative models, and call upon historical evidence and current data to understand how society was formed and why people do what they do. 

After all, nothing exists in a vacuum; it’s all made of systems, both natural and human-made. But in America, unlike in the alluvial plain, our dominant systems are defined by individualism, not interconnection. In response to the Enlightenment arose the Great Awakening: a religious fervor that swept Great Britain and the nascent U.S. nation in the 19th century, emphasizing sin and salvation; the evil or pious actions of specific people. The Enlightenment was its rational antidote, but was also individually focused, centered around the constant questioning of independent minds. 

But then came the Industrial Revolution, yielding America’s real guiding philosophy: capitalist consumerism. It married our need to be part of something greater with the image of rugged independence, birthing the illusion of the American Dream: the myth that one’s bootstraps could be sufficiently tugged to propel oneself to a wealth-based nirvana. We created fiat money, a faith-based currency that only has value because we all agree it does, and powerful interests built towering industries on the backs of Black slaves and Indigenous land seized through genocide, creating stratified classes that buried people of color and queers and gender-variant people and women under layers of sediment, calcified over centuries. 

And so America has ping-ponged back and forth, occasionally arriving at moments of near-breakthrough, poised on the precipice of unity consciousness, only to bounce right back. The New Deal, the Civil Rights movement, hippie culture, and perhaps the biggest paradigm-shifter, the invention of the internet, each threatened to upend the separatist paradigm. But each time, we were lured back by the siren song of consumption: the commodity culture of the 1950s and ‘60s, the Greed Decade, the dot-com boom and bust, chat rooms yielding to social media profiles and image-crafting.

Part of why we keep falling back is because those at the bottom of the social stratification believe that they got themselves there, so it’s up to them to dig themselves out. But that stream isn’t running through a valley that was already there; those grooves were cut by the waters of the culture. As the brilliant writer and performer ALOK eloquently described in their book report on eugenics and queer identity: If you have a soul-sickness, it’s not your fault, because our environments shape us, and in America’s case, the shaping is intentional, done to ensure those patriarchal sedimentary layers stay at the top. 

The oft-touted concept of “nature versus nurture,” Alok says, is taken from eugenics; if you can prove someone is “born this way,” you can identify those genes in order to eliminate them. But the reality is that nature is nurture. You are your environment, the things that happened to you, and all that you inflicted upon it, too. Creating healthier environments and organisms, therefore, requires full ecosystem participation. Rivers engage in a constant and infinite interplay between erosion and deposition, birth and death, just like societies and their people. Governed by common processes, but each outcome unique. The changes happen over centuries, and from a long enough view, it’s impossible to distinguish cause from effect.

Enlightenment happens little by little, lap, lap, lap, the slow impact of waves over time upon a shell, a mountain, a soul. Eroding the ego in rivulets, ripples, raindrops, and maybe sometimes through massive glacial events, such as the one we find ourselves in now. The pandemic is another chance to awaken; to choose the way of the collective, the ecosystem, the bigger picture. This doesn’t mean erasing individuality: to the contrary, each organism is a unique expression of the larger system. But it does mean understanding and appreciating the interplay, the interdependence, the finite nature of physical resources, and the deposition of sediment upon what’s beneath. 

The thing about flowing water is that it’s always changing course. There is always another chance, whether it’s to trickle in a different direction down a slope, to take action instead of letting life happen to you, to rebuild broken systems or restore severed connections. The fluvial geomorphology of the soul is always at work, even when you can’t see it—it’s happening little by little, lap, lap, lap, and eventually, you will find yourself a tall, tall mountain.