Mississippi dreaming and a sage or two offer solace

A friend of mine gave me an isochrone map of the Mississippi River before it got fixed in place by the levees, locks and dams of the last century. The map, drawn by a man called Harold Fisk, shows the tremendously long history of the river in a single delicious  page of geological spectacle. It's a thing of wonder — the ancient river, immortalised in riotous swirls of pinks, peaches, greens, yellows and blues, roves across time and space, filling the page with its many meanders. Here is every journey the river has travelled over its very long life all at once and everywhere. Until I gazed on the map I'd never seen a better illustration of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus' observation that you never step into the same river twice. 

The river is always changing — in the moment and over time and, of course, so are you. It seems almost rude to call it by the same name — the  Mississippi River — when it has shape shifted so dramatically, and yet it is unarguably the same river that started at point A somewhere in  the far north and consistently moved a body of water for millennia in a certain direction to point B-ish, far south, cutting a swathe across the entire continent. In its essence, it's the river everyone agreed should be called the Mississippi, starting with the Ojibwe people who called it the Misi-zibi. It is indeed the “great river”. 

It's as old as the continents — something primal springing from the shifting tectonic plates and the elementary forces of the Earth. They called it the “old man”, but once it was a young thing, springing fresh from the new earth. I get a kind of existential vertigo thinking about it. It makes the towns and bridges and boats and ports look matchbox fragile and insignificant in this greater pattern of geological time. It's as if the tiny ant-like creatures building their nests and their elaborate taming constructions on these shores and down the length of the river in an attempt to master it are like the citizens of Lilliput, imprisoning Gulliver for a brief speck of time before he breaks their flimsy shackles and moves on to the land of the horses. 

It’s hard not to believe the river is some kind of animated god, simply biding his time until the next ice age dawns and then this tiresome infestation will just  be washed away. The giant will sneeze and the spell will break. 

I've taken to gazing at the map of the river every time I am tempted to give in to extreme panic and despair at the state of the world. Iran, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Ukraine, Russia, Mars, Troy, Pompei. It’s a lot. I get caught up in the minutiae — so many bombs, so many heated words, so much noise. I take solace in the idea of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, king of the world but sitting in a tent on an endless campaign somewhere on the banks of some other ancient river writing consolations to himself: “There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.”

Then I give in to the feeling that I'm drifting on a little raft down this inexorable sweep of time and space, just a speck of life with my own river beds meandering to the left and to the right, flooding my banks, silting up the bayous , always, always heading for the Gulf of Mexico.