Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 29 -- The Underground River as Metaphor
His trinitarianism ran like a SUBTERRANEAN RIVER throughout his career as a pastor and
polemicist; it did not dominate his public discourse. -- Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Supreme
Harmony of All: the Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards (2002)
Nathaniel Hawthorne laid open a powerful UNDERGROUND STREAM in "The Scarlet Letter" -
one in which desire and shame converge. -- Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe, October 10, 2004
Nevertheless, the UNDERGROUND STREAM was there, and it was because she had so much
personality to put into her enterprises and succeeded in putting it into them completely that her
affairs prospered better than those of her neighbors. -- Willa Cather, O Pioneers! (1913)
Power
There are great reservoirs of spiritual energy waiting to be tapped. If the architects of American
morale are aware of this UNDERGROUND RIVER of power and idealism, tremendous things
may be achieved in our time. -- M. Griesser , "Underlying Factors in Democratic Morale,"
Journal of Educational Sociology 15:7, 1942
We feel the flow of thought, its power like an UNDERGROUND RIVER finding its way for the
first time through some shifted ground -- even if he doesn't know where it will come out. --
Robert Bly, Neruda and Vallejo, Selected Poems (1993)
The feeling I get when I write is akin to dropping through a trap door into the flow of an
UNDERGROUND RIVER, I stand in the current and just as a plant absorbs nutrients and
energy from its surroundings, I absorb the energy of this SUBTERRANEAN RIVER through my
soul. This is not willed, it simply happens. -- Karen Hesse, author of Wish on a Unicorn (1991)
Rage
It is not, though, and anyone with a sense of recent film history can see Thelma & Louise in the
honorable line of movies whose makers, without quite knowing what they were doing, sank a
drill into what appeared to be familiar American soil and found that they had somehow tapped
into a wild- rushing SUBTERRANEAN STREAM of inchoate outrage and deranged violence. --
Richard Schickel, Elizabeth L. Bland, Sally B. Donnelly and Martha Smilgis, "Gender Bender
Over Thelma & Louise," Time Magazine, June 24, 1991
Replenishment
He rules in exile like a king who hides in public and writes nothing down. He replenishes his
sources from an UNDERGROUND RIVER that is the home of the most hardy fishes. He lives
in the mind like a lover in the attic who won't come down, who needs everything brought to him
in order to survive. He talks on the phone to the mind with whom he quarrels and then hangs
up without saying good bye. He works out all day on a secret track. Is vain, vain, vain in short
short shorts. -- Chard DeNiord, "Eros," The American Poetry Review, September 1, 2007
Mem, as the sign of Miriam, leads us to sing and praise God for our survival up to this point.
We've made it through some deep waters. Our struggles aren't over yet, but we're still alive!
Mem also reminds us that deep wells exist of which we may not be aware. Hidden, ancient
UNDERGROUND STREAMS fill these wells. When we find them and dip our buckets, we tap
into those deep currents of life. -- Richard Seidman and Lawrence Kushner, The Oracle of
Kabbalah, Mystical Teachings of the Hebrew Letters (2001)
Sightless
The memory that forsakes the sunlight, like the fishes in the UNDERGROUND RIVER, loses its
eyes; the cloud of its grief carries no rainbow; behind the veil. -- George MacDonald, St.
George and St. Michael (1876)
Spirituality
An underground river can be seen as cause.
DRAFT 1122//66//22001122
Uppddaatteess aatt hhttttpp::////www. .uunnm. .eedduu//~rrhheeggggeenn//UnnddeerrggrroouunnddRi ivveerrss. .hhttml l
384