Wading Further

Once there was a woman who knew rivers the way some people know maps.

She didn’t learn them from books. She learned them from standing still long enough to feel when the water beneath her feet had stopped moving. In those places, the surface might look calm, even beautiful, but underneath it was heavy—silted, starved of oxygen, repeating the same small circles over and over. Fish avoided it. Birds passed over without landing. Nothing new grew there.

So when the river stalled, she did not panic.

She stepped out.

She sat on the bank, shook the mud from her skirts, and waited. Not because she was lost, but because she understood something most people didn’t: forcing motion in dead water only pulls you under. Purpose doesn’t respond to struggle. It responds to alignment.

Time passed. Seasons changed. She watched light move across the water. She listened. She rested.

And then, one day—not with thunder, not with prophecy—she noticed a change.

A thin line of movement near the edge.

A sound that hadn’t been there before.

A coolness where the water touched stone.

Rivulets.

Small at first. Almost dismissible. But she knew better. Flow always begins this way—quiet, polite, easily missed by those who need certainty before they move.

She stood.

As she stepped back into the river, the water did not resist her. It welcomed her, adjusting around her legs, making room. It wasn’t asking her to fight, or prove, or perform. It simply carried on, and she carried with it.

The stagnant pool fell behind her without ceremony. No goodbye. No reckoning. Just distance.

As she walked, the river widened. Branches rejoined. Tributaries remembered each other. The current strengthened not because she pushed it, but because she stopped blocking her own direction.

She realized then that purpose was not a destination waiting downstream.

Purpose was movement itself—

the feeling of water answering her step,

the way effort turned into momentum,

the quiet recognition of yes, this way.

She did not need to save the river.

She did not need to explain why she left the still water behind.

She did not need to convince anyone standing on the bank.

She only needed to keep walking where the water moved.

And as the current carried her forward, light began to gather on the surface again—not blinding, not dramatic, just enough to see her path. Just enough to know she was back where she belonged.