Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 29 -- The Underground River as Metaphor
As an artist, we drop down the well into the stream. We hear what's down there and we act on
it -- more like taking dictation than anything fancy having to do with art. -- Julia Cameron, The
Artist's Way, A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self (1992)
Life
She took solace in the impersonal life that flowed through her LIKE AN UNDERGROUND
STREAM... the life that generated babies, and ate away voraciously at all organic life, and
animated the wind in the trees, and made her heart beat... without her consent or
understanding. -- Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door upon Myself (1990)
Multiplicity
There is one UNDERGROUND RIVER -- but there are many wells into that river: an African
well, a Taoist well, a Buddhist well, a Jewish well, a Muslim well, a goddess well, a Christian
well, and aboriginal wells. Many wells but one river. -- Matthew Fox, Meditations with Meister
Eckhart (1982) commenting on “Divinity is an UNDERGROUND RIVER that no one can stop
and no one can stop.” -- Meister Eckhart (1260-1327)
Mystery
Music is like an UNDERGROUND RIVER… You don’t know where it comes from and you
don’t know where it’s going… What I have been content with is to see music as a mystery, and
I leave it at that. -- Philip Glass, composer
Nutrition
Unknown to many, Ecstasy has a less recreational, more medicinal history. In the 1970s and
1980s, the chemical known as MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or N-methyl-3,4methylenedioxyphenylisopropylamine)
was used secretly by a select group of psychiatrists and
therapists in the United States and Europe... When I learned about MDMA, I realized that this
was an extraordinary situation in which there was a semisecret UNDERGROUND RIVER that
was nourishing the psychedelic community. -- Julie Holland, Ecstasy, The Complete Guide : A
Comprehensive Look at the Risks and Benefits (2001)
Sparks are those ideas that catch the light, inviting us into remembrances, explorations, and
connections with those UNDERGROUND RIVERS that nourish us. -- Michelle LeBaron,
Bridging Troubled Waters, Conflict Resolution from the Heart (2002)
Obscurity
Let me hold my course in silence for a while, and in obscurity, like a SUBTERRANEAN RIVER;
the time shall come that I will burst forth in my strength, and bear all opposition before me. -- Sir
Walter Scott, Kenilworth (1821)
Permeation
An UNDERGROUND RIVER of filth... ran under the city. There was no turning back. I had to
wade the excremental river. -- Ross Macdonald, The Moving Target (1949), the first Lew Archer
mystery
Beneath the landscape of trends and school and movements run UNDERGROUND STREAMS
of sympathy and influence -- J.D. McClatchy, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American
Poetry (2003)
A poet who “engages the UNDERGROUND STREAM of our lives.” -- Peter Davison on W.S.
Merwin, Boston Globe poetry editor
Persistence
Yet that was far from the end of the Neoplatonist current, that half-UNDERGROUND RIVER
that has often divided as it sought new channels and is yet to run dry. -- Robert S. Ellwood,
Islands of the Dawn, The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand (1993)
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