Restoring Big Rivers

When your mind is in a restoration mode your thoughts are bent towards the aspect of rejiggering the hierarchy. So I began looking outside convention to the margins, the footnotes of history, for signs of ways of doing things that maybe were out of sync with the times, but might have some real promise. Typical of being in this mindset, I talked about it every chance I got, to see if there would be anything uncovered in the conversations. I had the idea in my mind that there was some yet undiscovered secret way to marshal like-minded folks into accomplishing the grand work of reform and restoration. I hoped that somehow we could reconfigure our managing ways into something effective, yet low to the ground--almost invisible.

A friend of mine suggested that I read about Leo Tolstoy, who, to my surprise, was Russia's first refusenik. He was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church for his published opinions about Christianity. Tolstoy essentially believed that you couldn't mix Christianity with government nor wage war under the name of God. He put these opinions in a book, the "Kingdom of God is Within You." The book was banned in Russia, published in German and translated into English.

A copy of the English translation found its way into the hands of an Indian lawyer named Mahatmas Ghandi. At the time he lived in the Natal, South Africa. He used much of the rubric of the book as a cornerstone for the nonviolent overthrow of the British occupation of India. I think he took a certain relish at the thought of using a Christian tome to thwart the political sensibilities of his Anglican occupiers.

The book is written in a dense, flat format, the kind of writing you find in plumbing "how to" books. Tolstoy abandoned the artistic style he was famous for to make sure that his literary flourish didn't get in the way of his message. He accomplished that. He was a true zealot. Its use is limited though, unless you have designs on the active peaceful overthrow of a huge brutal governmental institution. What was more intriguing to me than the book, however, was his life outside of the writing at the time. Tolstoy had this grand global conversation going on with marginal Christian outfits, revolutionaries and a Hindu lawyer. He espoused nonviolence in a world of war. It was the extreme frontier of spiritual logic, if there is such a thing. Tolstoy stood alone in the face of his culture, religion and politics.

I had the benefit of a hundred years of history to reflect on and see if the book had made any difference. His own countrymen were predisposed to the violent overthrow of the Russian monarchy. In India the results were mixed. It took almost 50 years but Ghandi was able to use peaceful means to overthrow the British. In the end, though, he couldn't stop the internal violence between the Hindus and the Muslims.

About this time, I happened to come across an article in the New York Times about the nonviolent overthrow of Milosevik's brutal regime in Serbia. Hundreds of thousands of people had organized a national nonviolent demonstration and had successfully toppled a government that had made Serbia an anathema among the nations of the world. It was a remarkable story, given the reputation of the people. What caught my eye in the story was that the journalist had used the phrase "hierarchically flat" to describe the leadership of the movement. The movement had been "coordinated," not necessarily lead in a conventional way. I usually associate political overthrow with podiums, fiery speeches in front of excited crowds delivered by a highly charismatic leader and great cheers going up while the outer rim of the crowd is pressed in by threatening military. But this movement was unique in that respect. It wasn't fiery speeches but cell phones, T-shirts, posters and rank and file excitement. The other fact was that it was entirely peaceful.

These elements, taken together, for me were amazing, and the fact that it had happened in Serbia, astonishing. The story did point out that the funding for the cell phones, T-shirts and other printed propaganda for this extravagant venture came from the CIA. That really didn't check my thinking on the matter, because you can't force folks to demonstrate on the scale and in the way they did.

I was reading the article a few weeks after it happened, the beginning of November 1999. Like most interesting information, it floated around in my brain for awhile, bumping up against other thoughts and ideas. But this article seemed to have a different weight to it. More was required. I had to check this out for myself. I thought that maybe I could touch the moment somehow, and get an intuitive notion of what happened, and possibly see God.

I wanted to go and see what had happened in Belgrade. The big focus at the time was Kosovo, where the entire Albanian population had been driven out by the Serbs. Serbia had been essentially surrounded and bombed into submission. It wasn't easy to get in to the country. I wasn't a journalist, NGO representative or missionary. My reasons for going were purely personal, wanting to peer into a moment in history where a government was put out of office by peaceful means. There was no Yugoslavian consulate in the US at the time so I had to get a visa from the consulate in Ottowa, Canada. It looked risky, so some handholding was in order. I asked a few friends if they would like to come along on the adventure. Four months after the overthrow of Milosevik we had visas to Belgrade. Getting to Belgrade was still an unknown. That would have to be figured out when we got to Budapest.

I remembered looking at old maps of Africa where the whole interior was blank with the words "unexplored." The farther inland the lines of rivers and national borders went the more the lines representing them began to fade. At the end of 1999, looking at Fodor's travel map of the Balkans was pretty much the same. No airports, no roads, no railroads, no hotels, no real information. What was once a western European travel destination with great forests and wonderful beaches on the Adriatic now was a war zone. This was a new place in our world; actually new places, as the Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, Albanians and Slovenes would tell you. New boundaries had been fixed around ethnic neighborhoods. Fields were mined to keep the unwanted out. Checkpoints were established on previously uninterrupted country roads. Whole populations had been horribly reminded of the reasons to hate your neighbor. Travel into the former Yugoslavia was not recommended.

We flew to Budapest, and hoped from there to be able to gain entry into Serbia. A man got on the plane in Frankfurt wearing a small pin on his lapel with a white fist against a black background. It was the symbol of the Serbian resistance movement. One of our party had been seated next to him and struck up a conversation. By the time we had arrived in Budapest, our new Serbian friend had arranged all of our transportation into Belgrade. The trains would be very difficult for us he said. He contracted a driver for us who would pick us up in Budapest and get us through the border and into Belgrade. It started out well. We were picked up by the particular driver and headed for the Serbian border. To this point everything had gone very smoothly: planes, cars, drivers, hotels, restaurants--the effortless tour.

We arrived at the Serbian border. The checkpoint was staffed with military instead of the usual customs and immigration officials. Everyone carried rifles and machine guns. It certainly didn't look like a country full of peaceniks. It was evident that we were leaving the European/American happy hands and happy hearts club. But we got through with no problem.

As we passed through the checkpoint it dawned on me that the only thing different in Serbia after the demonstrations was that Milosevic was out of office. However, the entire Serbian military was still collecting a paycheck. The whole political and military apparatus that had wreaked havoc for the last ten years, with the exception of one man, was still operating. As we drove through the countryside there seemed to be military checkpoints everywhere. Drivers were standing next to their cars while the police searched them, but our van driver was waved through at least six checkpoints.

Driving through the outskirts into Belgrade I noticed a tall office building maybe thirty stories high. It had been burned from top to bottom. I wondered how a building with that much glass and steel could host a fire that large. It looked like someone got careless with matches and thirty thousand gallons of gasoline. Then I saw a large elliptical hole in the side of the structure. My memory served up an image, a TV fiction of a large blue building that was bombed, the headquarters of Yugoslavian television run by Milosevic's daughter. I craned my neck to see the top of the building; there was a tangle of blackened transmission towers bent like old trees. Reality had finally pierced the fiction. I started to feel lonely just then.

After an unfriendly welcome at a rather desperate looking hotel, we opted for the high ground and wound up staying at the Belgrade Intercontinental, a very nice place that had the feel of a politically neutral zone. The lobby of the hotel was enormous. Its decor was reminiscent of an old James Bond movie. There were large potted plants scattered around, round pillars and large circular purple leather couches. It seemed that behind each pillar was a man with a cell phone with a lot of quiet business being carried out.

After we checked into our room, I put my pillow over my head and I prayed to God to have the angel in charge of drunks and fools look into my plight. I believed I had made a huge mistake. Worse, I had brought my friends along. The hotel was a sanctuary of sorts, but outside the doors was a city still in the throes of change. Traveling over the years, I had come to think that my blue American passport was like a scapula, a charm that could ward off any evil while abroad. Now I was sure that the magic that had kept me for many years had worn off. Just before I dug myself as deep in the covers as I could get, I looked out my window across the Sava river and up the rise that was the city skyline; it was completely black. Two million souls were sitting in the darkness, no lights anywhere. We had come all this way and I had no idea what to do next. The reality of the border we had crossed, the bombed buildings and the surly reception we had received entering the city was taking its toll.

The next morning we hired a driver to show us the sights. We could think of nothing else to do because we had no plan. The driver took us to the old fortification originally built by the Romans. It was strategically located on the high ground above the confluence of the Danube and Sava Rivers.

On our way to the castle ruins one of our party asked the driver where OTPOR, the resistance group, was located and could he take us there. The driver said nothing, but I could tell the question was extremely irritating to him. I could see him tighten his grip on the steering wheel and the veins in his neck bulge. Arriving at the fortress, his irritation with our ignorance of the political situation there spilled over into his "tour." In a deadpan he related the history of the sight, which was a long series of invading armies succeeding and failing, each effort at a great cost to the locals. It dawned on me that these people had been at war for a long time. Now that the last effort under Tito to corral the various populations of the Balkans had failed, they were all back at the ancient business of settling scores. I knew what terrible damage the Serbian military had done to its neighbors. At that very moment a US delegation in Belgrade was holding out aid to Serbia in exchange for Milosevik being extradited to The Hague for war crimes. He was still in town. The fact that the atrocities committed throughout the Balkans were committed by white Europeans was unnerving to the Western world.

Sometimes I think that the reason it took so long for the international community to act on behalf of the oppressed in the region, namely the Bosnians and the Albanians in Kosovo, was that it was outside our rational paradigm. We could stomach the atrocities in the Third World and our record proves as much. But educated white people, in a country that hosted the winter Olympics in 1984? When Yugoslavia began disintegrating, the Serbians held most of the military men and equipment in Belgrade. No one in the region could match them. When the war began the UN put a weapons embargo on the region so the Bosnians were left essentially defenseless. The Serbian military took full advantage of the situation. They waged a modern war with a medieval mindset. The war crime indictments tell the story: mass executions of prisoners, systematic rape and ethnic cleansing. Once the oppressed Bosnians, Albanians and Croats were capable of revenge, many Serbians were killed in reprisals. The hatred seemed to cut as many ways as there were differences of race, religion, culture and politics. A country that lived in relative peace for fifty years suddenly exploded, and went on a binge of war that had lasted ten years, settling scores that in some cases were over 600 years old. But that was precisely why I was here. How could a people capable of such carnage, at the same time successfully pull off a massive peace demonstration that toppled one of the wickedest regimes in the world? I doubted I could get my mind around the problem but I could get a notion of it just by being there.

Our driver began to become animated as his talk veered into the present. He told us that he had a contract to drive journalists around the country when it was at war. "They just wanted pictures of terrible things. They would take their pictures, do their interview and get drunk. This war was like a fiction to them, most of the time they didn't even know where they were when they woke up, and they didn't seem to care as long as there was war near by and some pictures to take," he said. He told us that he had been a manager of a factory that employed 500 people. Now he was lucky to drive a cab. He talked of Yugoslavia as a country that had the largest forests in Europe and fondly of the Dalmatian Coast, now in a country he cannot trespass. He remembered a whole country.

"Milosevik destroyed us," he said bitterly. "Then you, our friends, start bombing us! How could you do this?" He talked of the 78 days of aerial bombing. I asked him what the people did while this was going on.

"Every night we would go to the city square. The cafes would open and there would be music and dancing while the bombing was going on. Otherwise we would go mad." He said the bombing was a complete surprise, a shock. It was the greatest sting to their pride. Once he was a Yugoslavian, a citizen of a country that had a promising place in the world community. Now it was the scourge of Europe and the world. He felt the shame. I let him lead the conversation and see where it would go. I wasn't a journalist chasing a scoop. We didn't talk of what was going on in Kosovo, or what had happened in Sarajevo. And as in most wars, the civilian population suffered the most. He seemed like a regular guy, confused, hurt, shamed and angry; the typical emotional products of war.

We wandered around the castle, taking a few snapshots. As I stood alone looking at the tenements across the river, the driver came up to me. "Who are you, and what are you doing here?" He seemed frustrated. I think he felt awkward letting loose and talking so much. He was staring at me waiting for his answer. I felt his confusion and pain. It was easy to see. Again, I was the victor and he the vanquished. The words came slowly.

"I am from Colorado and I don't represent anyone. Why I'm here? I guess I came to tell you that as an American I'm sorry for bombing your city and causing you so much pain." Ten years of frustration came bubbling up to the surface, his eyes swelled with tears as did mine. He turned away and collected himself. It wasn't a calculated moment.

He changed after that. He told us that his two teenage sons were runners during the resistance movement, that he would try to set us up a meeting with one of the leaders/coordinators of the resistance. He proceeded to take us on the real tour of the city--bombed buildings. One of them was the American library where we saw the building had been burned and boarded up, with "NATO Killers" spray painted across the front. Another was the Chinese Embassy, a building far removed from the traditional embassy row. It was far across town and across the river, a modern building, of glass, steel and concrete. It was still standing, but the interior was completely destroyed. The Chinese flag was still flying and a lone security guard occupied the guardhouse at the gate. It demonstrated the true precision of the bombs; they packed just enough explosives to destroy the building without, for the most part, ruining anything near the building--total destruction delivered to a street address. Any building associated with the Serbian Army was destroyed. And many of these buildings were in downtown Belgrade. The bombs took out buildings like a dentist takes out a bad tooth.

A day later our driver fixed a meeting with one of the chief coordinators of the resistance movement. He managed to corral one of the leaders between meetings to meet with us. We met in the lobby of our hotel, seated in the large circular leather booths. I still had no clue of what to say. Congratulations? Nice work? I came face to face with a young man who appeared to be about 25 years old. He was tall and thin, with a goateed, lean handsome face. He was rushed, late for a meeting. We fumbled around for a few minutes saying inane things. The man looked at us, clearly flustered at us wasting his time. I felt the knot in my stomach. I went for broke. I told him my little story about reading Tolstoy and how he had this grand conversation going on with the likes of Ghandi, how he had written a book and how it had been useful in effecting political change. I told him how I suspected that the grand occasion that they had witnessed and participated in to bring change to Serbia was divine, and that God was in the midst of their peaceful efforts. It was like I had hit him with a plank. He began to tear up and told how he had been arrested, interrogated and beaten 11 times by the military police. But during all those times the fear he felt was overwhelmed by peace. The great peace movement became one young man dealing with his fear day to day, and wondering why he wasn't more afraid. Yes, maybe God did have something to do with it. He had to run to his meeting. Before leaving, he invited us to OTPOR headquarters the next afternoon. The doors continued to open.

The next day we came back to the main square of the city, ready for our debriefing at OTPOR HQ. We went through a nondescript doorway on the street and up a concrete flight of stairs with graffiti all over the walls. A pair of double doors swung open; in front of us was the nerve center of the revolution. It was a two-room office that had the look of the editorial offices of a radical college newspaper from the sixties. Paper was strewn everywhere. At a cluttered desk a kid with long hair and a cigarette hanging from his mouth stared at a typewriter. We interrupted him. The man we had met yesterday introduced us. We were ushered into the conference room. There was a large table and not enough chairs. Our host sat on the heater. With him was a lovely red-haired girl with a world-weary look, taking long boring drags on her cigarette, and a younger man who looked like the president of the science club at Belgrade High. After a brief introduction, the science club kid began a long monologue about OTPOR's role in the future of Serbia in environmental, political and social affairs. I could tell the red-haired girl had heard this rap about thirty times too many. She was the classic modern resistance femme fatale. All she needed was a beret and a trench coat. I could almost hear her saying in husky heavily accented English, "I will never love again, I only live for the resistance," as she took a long drag on the cigarette. The science club guy was talking about "Green Fist," an environmental spin off of OTPOR. The moment was gone. The resistance movement was over. Now I felt like a member of the local 4-H Club meeting the Serbian Resistance. It was awkward once again. Our host broke out the propaganda goodies, OTPOR lapel pins, pens, notepads, calendars and bumper stickers. With unsophisticated gusto, like true 4-Hers, we dug in.

From what I could see, the resistance movement had knocked a hole in their cultural dam. OTPOR was a political anomaly in their history. In its current form, the resistance movement would never be a political force. After all, they had accomplished their goal; what were they still resisting? Or were they morphing into reform? The great authentic collective moment was over. Now its obligation was to blend back into society. The great wounds that the society had inflicted and incurred will either have to heal or fester like they have for centuries. The resistance movement demonstrated a new spirit in the people, a great release of hope. The way the resistance was pulled off with its leadership way under the social radar, it would seem that the dignity of the moment was shared by all who participated. I can't say for sure, but it would seem that there was a restoration of individual confidence to effect change. But they are working themselves out of a deep hole. So many terrible things have happened to so many. I cannot imagine the postwar world of the Balkans, a sea of anguish, bitterness, confusion and anger. I can't help but think of the cycles of history of that region, that in a generation or so the great well of fear will be tapped to go to war again.

That said, the freedom to forgive and receive forgiveness is individual work. It is spiritual work, a sovereign effort. This type of restoration does not depend on the institutions to accommodate the individual. Restoration can be accomplished by the individual because restoration is entirely possible without a social or political structure. We live under good and bad regimes. Christianity thrived under the opposition of Rome, a great Western power. The end of it all is that each man and woman has to live with themselves. The responsibility they take on themselves now will give them the strength, dignity and reason to resist the fear mongers of the future. At least I hope so.

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In Ventura County, California, the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbit , was on hand one day in July 2000 to participate in the deconstruction process of a large western dam, the Matalija Dam on the Ventura River. At almost 50 years old and 210 feet high, the dam was coming down, sort of. The hired crane had a wrecking ball positioned at the left side of the dam. Secretary Babbit let the handle go. A sizable chunk of the dam was knocked out and water came gushing through. In the end, a 10 by 30 foot top section of the dam had been removed. Political will, community effort and a well-orchestrated campaign had resulted in the funding necessary for the deconstruction process of this dam. Valuable sand for the beaches adjacent to the estuary had been held back by the dam for a long time, along with organic sediment collected from the runoff from the mountains nearby.

The concept of restoration on some rivers takes on a complex reality. Mankind has literally created problems on a scale that we don't have the capacity to fix. We have plenty of alternatives in certain phases of discussion but we haven't really done it yet. They are all difficult, expensive and have a huge element of risk associated with them. So far dam deconstruction has existed on the margins of society, on small, defunct, spent dams on damaged rivers. Because dams are built by men and are created to hold back great tension, even though they are made of concrete, they are still subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Everything built by men is falling apart slowly but surely. But dams are a cachement for not only water but sediment. The concrete used to build the dam takes up an extraordinarily small amount of space in respect to the reservoir it creates. However, polluted sludge behind it on the big dams, is measured in the tens of millions of cubic yards. We have built the greatest dams the world has ever seen in this last century. But we have yet to take on the responsibility for taking one down and restoring what is behind it.

Locked behind the dam are six to seven million tons of ooze. Because of the layering of the sediment behind a dam, decomposition gets trapped in the layers, oxygen is depleted and the sediment becomes robbed of its natural nutrients. It is relegated to mud that you can't grow anything in--anerobic, sterile mud. It is one of those enormous low-technology problems we haven't solved yet. We have the trucks and backhoes and plenty of operators, but where do you put this much useless sediment? The choices are somewhat limited. If you let it slowly be released down the river it would leave the river full of suspended black mud for a long time. Or you could drain the dam and let it dry and use heavy equipment to cart if off. But you still have the problem of where to dispose of it. The third option might be to cover it with special matting and let the river flow over it. All these options add an expense to the dams that was never calculated in the building costs. It is the backside of our efforts in creating dominion over the river.

Back to the Columbia, depending on how you look at the river, you could say things have never been worse or better. As a power river system, it is unparalleled in the world, but as a living organic system, things are bad and slowly getting worse. Reality is that the system is managed, the dams are there, and the prospect of them being removed doesn't seem likely. The idea of true restoration in the Columbia River system would require radical deconstruction. It is not just the dams that would go, but well-entrenched, vested economic and political regimes would face extinction. Jobs, money, convenience and power would fall under the ax. Honest restoration of the Columbia is difficult to imagine. It is completely irrational. Yet the debate about restoration rages.

Experts from both sides argue, lobby, and sue each other as part of the grinding process. On the salmon restoration side, people are fighting for an environmental ideal. They want a river that is far less mechanical, with greater flows that provide much more access for salmon moving up and downstream. The trade-off would be kilowatt hours and irrigation water, for fish. But real change is brushed aside by the conversation of it. If we are talking about it then it must be happening. The political dialogue takes the place of actual restoration.

On the other hand, the river isn't catching on fire or filled with industrial waste. By most standards it is a pretty clean river, excluding the nuclear waste hazard of the Hanford Nuclear Site. It doesn't scream for restoration. But it no longer functions as a river, and its ecological structure has been severely altered. The original inhabitants of the river can't survive in it. Like many sick people, illness rages behind a calm exterior. For the river, redemption/restoration may lie where the river got its beginning, in cataclysm. Redemption will not be found in words.

For the vested interests, the barge companies, the irrigators and the aluminum companies, the words 'wild salmon' hold the same reverence as the great buffalo herds of the Midwest. They are just part of the price of advancement. Reconciling that price of virtual extinction is a tough sell with those wishing to maintain the vitality of the river or what is left of it. But everyone, for the sake of being politically correct, must engage the proper political dialogue. You must be 'for' the salmon. However, it is difficult to see where the issue is going through the great fog of argument. To the observer, futility, exhaustion and hopelessness are the results of this battle.

So what do we put our hand to? The honest spirit that drives us to connect meaningfully and participate in something tangible, requires response. We are drawn to epic battles with powerful foes in full view of a great public. If victorious, we usually emerge with a compromise--a half-solution to the problem. But in the trade we become part of the machine in the process. We are part of the argument that gives the appearance of progress bringing reason full circle, like a well-choreographed dance. No, in the end, the conclusion is that you are one human, and after all that battle, effort and publicity, individually you have to connect with the real river .

This is the mindset that is growing about rivers. They are becoming personal. The dams, on big and small rivers alike, are seen for what they have eliminated and blocked--the life of the river. We understand the potential of rivers better than we ever have. We have been embarrassed by how we have taken them for granted and polluted them. But in the last 30 years, national legislation along with local public commitment has seen a dramatic turn in both the health of the rivers and the heart people have for them.

Efforts to clean up the rivers started out with pollution legislation. But after awhile, clean just wasn't enough; people began to see that rivers functioned and supported life. In a totally natural state they could, over time, clean themselves. Although pollution was a problem, it was the dams that slowed the cleansing process of the river by trapping the pollutants in the sludge behind the dams.

Restoration on rivers with big dams is careful work. Studies have shown that it costs considerably less to build a dam than it costs to take one down. The engineering required for deconstruction is still a fairly new skill that is being acquired while deconstruction projects move forward. It is dealing with tension and vast accumulations of silt and sediment. Most dams have been in place for a considerable amount of time and the river has stabilized around the alterations. The contemplation of releasing tension is evaluating the true damage that has been done. Reservoirs have become enormous septic tanks, over time collecting along with the natural sediment, the spillage from our mechanized society which shows up as fertilizer and pesticides, mercury from old mining efforts, and DDT from the sixties. It is our history shown as pollution. Remarkably, like our history, these reservoirs remind me of the old political and religious boundaries collecting ancient hatreds and watching them spill out in terrible moments in the nightly news.

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So I went to Serbia and talked very briefly to a few people. Person to person. We cooked up no grand schemes to further our little moment. I said precisely, however briefly, what I thought I was to say. Then we came home. Getting all the way there and back was exhilarating. But I didn't know what to do next. I felt like the guy who started Green Fist. What was the next logical step? There wasn't any. It wasn't logical to begin with, so why start now?

The ideas I had for restoring my world changed considerably. I experienced my own thinking. My thoughts had to be smacked with a slag hammer of reality. The idea of a flat hierarchy had some merit I suppose, but my context was still stuck in the religious architecture of the past. I came back with more questions than answers. I still didn't know what happened with the resistance movement or if the Serbians learned anything from their experiences. Like the Matalija Dam restoration, there is a hole in their thinking that wasn't there before. And, as with the dam, the enormous work of dealing with all that residue of bitterness, frustration, confusion and distrust behind their borders is very intimate work. No national apologies will assuage the pain of their neighbors or bring back anyone's loved ones. It is deeply spiritual work that must happen outside of the political realm. The restoration of the possible exists in what people can do for each other on a day-to-day intimate level.

And so it seems with Christianity. We can knock a few holes in our denominational thinking but the real work of wholeness rests with the individual. I went looking for some organizational magic in Serbia, some secret managerial formula that could coordinate the faithful into some grander spiritual moment like Tolstoy had hoped for, something that would unify that "Kingdom of God" that is within us all in some rational way. I learned nothing about the resistance movement there except that maybe a young man who wondered about feeling peaceful in a dangerous and difficult moment now has a sense of the divine. And now a cab driver feels like he received some forgiveness for an enemy that caused him pain. I can't say for sure, but it seemed the time there was thick with God; I did nothing to make it happen other than show up. I got a sense of legitimacy in wandering around Serbia that I hadn't experienced before: that it was just fine to follow my intuitions and see where they would take me, that the effort taken to make sense out of a deep bubbling in my spirit has great value. My world became very big and very intimate at the same time, a paradox that seems to fit being taken by the current of a great river in springtime into a life-giving unknown.

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