Find me by the River
By Cheryl Rostek
Dec 2023

Find me by the river
With my heart laid bare
Find me by the river
There’s so much hope flowing there

Find me by the river
Fingers dipped in streams
Find me by the river
Where my soul can finally sing

Find me by the river
All barriers stripped away
Find me by the river
Finally learning how to pray

(Bold emphasis for present effect)

 

Peace Like A River

Here I am sitting by the river after a week of a doozy of a cold that still is not letting go. I’m learning once more how to pray. Slowing down and noticing are my failsafe spiritual practices for receiving Divine wisdom.

Today as I listen to the babbling river and let the sun warm my exposed legs from the chill in the breeze, I notice a solitary Canada goose. I watch it amble between plants on the sand of the natural jetty.  A few years back, flood waters created this jut-out of beach protruding from the river bank. The surge reshaped and remade the water’s pathway. Reeking havoc on several properties.

Though my eye was trained on the goose, somehow it’s disappeared. I scour the waters to see if it’s floating downstream. But it’s not. Neither is it wandering the driftwood or grasses. Gone. At least so it seems.

My mind trains quickly back to the river water, ‘I’ve got peace like a river’, flashes thru my head. I used to sing the line as a child at church. Peace like a river. Peace. 

And here I am, by the river, (so easily) inspired. The river didn’t care that floodwater redirected it’s course. It’s rustling and gurgling and rushing along just the same; it flows guided by rules of physics and laws of gravity moving from higher ground toward sea level. It does not worry that the pathway has changed. It’s us humans that have the issue when rerouted waters compromise our human made structures. 

River Prayer & Mary Oliver

The breeze picks up making the chill in the air more noticeable. Also the rays of the sun more favorable. I blow my stuffy nose.

And I know now I am in the full throes of prayer because I understand: water surrenders to the new pathway. And I understand the song from my childhood because peace like a river is surrender.

Two or three days ago, reading Mary Oliver’s lovely collection of essays, Upstream, I came across a line that grabbed me and commanded me to go find a pen. “Hope I know is a fighter and a screamer” I scrawled the line into my journal. Later into another. Oliver had grabbed my attention away from sipping my coveted caffeine. In response, I journaled about hope formulating the beginnings of what I’ve so-far titled: A Brain Cancer Survivor’s Essay on Hope. Because finding hope in life’s impossible circumstances has been my tagline since day one of my diagnosis. 

As an eight year brain cancer survivor Hope and I have been on some journey, let me tell you. I wondered if perhaps, Mary Oliver had only captured the early phase of Hope’s essence in her phrase. Because ‘Fighter Hope’ and ‘Screamer Hope’ sounded like the Rah! Rah! Cancer Survivor banter I’d subscribed to as a terrified 35 year old pining ardently to be in the less than 5 percent of glioblastoma patients who survive 5 years. Fighter and Screamer Hope surely squeezed the best lemonade out of life’s lemons. But, I wondered, can Fighter and Screamer Hope still fit when life’s lemonade sours beyond consumption? Aka when radiation fatigue paired with two babies and a preschooler and the unsustainable Rah Rah rhetoric fizzles.

Is Hope still a Fighter and a Screamer then? 

My mind churns as I stare at the stream and I hear a group of young adults banter as they crunch on the gravel trail behind me. What is Hope when “you’re living an impossible life.” Words my counsellor said to me.

Surrender & God’s Love is an Ocean

What’s hope then? The answer comes again: It’s surrender. I’ve written this concept into my Hope essay’s rough draft. I try it on for size once more. 

Surrender is hope because it allows. Surrender doesn’t dam up the stream. it doesn’t get hung up and stagnate. No, it allows movement downstream. The movement of river water is a flow toward the greater open water of the sea. Where God’s Love is an ocean waiting for me. 

God’s love is an ocean. This phrase/experience/knowing came to me February 2017 in California. I’d recently finished radiation treatment but had six rounds of chemo yet to go. And I’d wanted a tropical family trip. Before I died. Though it sounds simple, with twin babies and a toddler and my plummeting energy, it was not. My husband, the expert figure-outer, sorted that if his mom and his brother’s family came too, to help out, it could be manageable. Sort of. The noise and commotion of my three little children plus the addition of my not much older, certainly not quieter, niece and nephew and my mounting post-radiation fatigue and my daughter puking and it seemed the list went on meant this was not the dream vacation I’d hoped for. But on the last day, everyone left to go souvenir shopping but me. As I stood on the condo’s tiny balcony I careened my neck to be able to see the pie shaped piece of blue: the ocean. In those quiet moments I knew: God’s love is an ocean. Vast. Expansive. Remarkable.(1)   

Surrendering to the river flow, whatever it’s shape may be, therefore, is a movement toward the ocean of God’s Love. Surrendering is letting go of the hold old ideas, conditions, situations have on me. 

Logic kicks in and I’m skeptical, does surrendering really fit with Oliver’s fighter and screamer hope definition?  

Here at the river I know: it fits. 

Surrender is not easy, nor passive like it may look at first glance. It’s not like lollygagging on an inner tube down the stream with a bag of cherries laughing and seeing how far you can launch the pits with your mouth. (Like I did when I was 23 years old living in Calgary, floating down the Bow)

Surrender means fiercely grieving what was. A challenging task for a nostalgic like me. But a worthy practice so I don’t cling to my life and lose it (2). Because this is my experience of surrender: I tantrumed like a toddler wanting “what was” to “still be”. Fighting my present reality. Screaming lalalalalalala it’s not fair and you can’t make me. “One week” my counselor said. “You can ‘put your head under your pillow’ for one week, then it’s time to keep living.” To keep living I needed to learn how to feel. Firstly, because my prognosis, one year, had blindsided me into numbness, sending me reeling. Secondly, because I wasn’t good at feeling. Pharmacist-me liked flow charts and best practice guidelines, not feelings to gum up my efficiency wheels. 

But Incentivized by making the most of my last days, I watched and consumed as much Brene Brown content as I could. I gobbled up books on the enneagram. And I learned how to feel the caustic raw hurt of my calloused skin being burned off, smelling the stench permeating every corner. (That’s what my existential crisis at 35 with 3 littles at home and clinging to my disappearing  career felt like. I have several other analogies too, but my writing books tell me to keep analogies in intense scenes to a minimum, so I’ll stick with this one, omitted from my memoir) This burning off the chaff of my life most certainly had me screaming and fighting, Oliver’s definition of hope. 

So yes I’ve decided, surrender is a form of hope- both gritty and fierce; believing for more and trusting the stream.

Bottom line

Indeed the river’s new shape (aka my life with brain cancer) is different than before. The Hope of Surrender shows me however, that not only is it different, it’s beautiful too. Because it’s in Surrender that the Hope of, what Dr. Paul Conti calls sublimation: taking negative energy and making it positive, occurs. (3) A new kind of – sparkling – lemonade. 

 

Dear reader, if you’ve joined me this far down the river, thank you. Bless you for joining me.  May we flow together into the open waters of Love.

xo
Cheryl

 

Notes:

  1. See my 2017 blogpost: God’s Love is An Ocean https://cherylrostek.com/index.php/2017/02/26/gods-love-is-an-ocean/
  2. In those early days after my brain cancer diagnosis I vehemently disliked this Matthew 10:39 bible verse. Cling to your life and you will lose it. The deepest parts of me found truth in these words; but gosh darn it I was white-knuckling my life! Not realizing that clenching onto life meant crushing anxiety. A challenging lesson for a 35 year old who sensed her peers were living oblivious to their mortality.   
  3. This is where I learned of Dr. Paul Conti https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/guest-series-dr-paul-conti-how-to-understand-and-assess-your-mental-health