Welcome to the Creek. This is Deer Creek that borders my land. And this is one of my teachers. This creek and all rivers change shape every year. Every winter this whole creek changes shape. It carves new things. Look at this mess. See, that? Used to be a bunch of trees. Brush. All this rock over here is like, used to be a big mountain of rock.

And now it’s flat.

The swimming hole is even deeper this year.

Every winter, the storms come and change. The shape of the water. Change the shape of the waterway, change the depth, change the constitution of the entire waterway. And this is my teacher for how I change two in every season, in every cycle, the storms come through my life and they change me. And they’re supposed to leave me different.

They’re meant to change me. They’re meant to leave me. Maybe a little pulverized, but also wiser and wiser for the changes.

So I wanted to share this with you. The sound and the shape of the creek. Knowing that it will never look and sound this way again because it’s always changing. So too are we always changing. You can’t go back. Do you ever think about what it would be like to go back in time to when you were younger, knowing what you know now, and also knowing that that is a ridiculous prospect even in the fantasy of it, because it’s impossible.

It’s impossible to go back in time and know what you know now, with the wisdom you’ve accrued. Because that wisdom, those crucibles, those challenges have changed us intrinsically. We are not the same river.

All of life has been preparing and shifting you, changing you, and shaping you to be who you are now. That’s why we don’t regret all the things that we lived through, all the difficulties. No matter how hard they are, we often don’t regret them because we know that without those challenges, we wouldn’t be here now in this place.

As these people serving as we do, we wouldn’t have the wisdom that we have now. So we might as well celebrate, might as well celebrate what this river is now, what this being is now, in all of her imperfections, in all of her aging physicality, this this is what the storms have done. And it’s good. What did the storms do to you recently?

How did they change your shape?