What is it like for the Ottauguechee?

In yesterday's post I posed the question given some of us at a retreat, "What is it like for you?" The "you" in this blog is the Ottauquechee.  This direct address brings closer to home Thomas Berry's magisterial words, "The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects."  My effort here is to explore the communion we have with this being, the river as it flows under the bridge to the east.

I used the "What is it like for you?" question in a sermon a few weeks ago.  One hearer reported  posing the question to a tree.  When she talked of it to her grandson, he could not resist a giggle.  It seems to me that engaging with the question requires what in fiction or drama is called "the willing suspension of disbelief."  We have become imbued with the belief that we humans are the only ones whose experience should be taken seriously.  To take seriously what Berry would call the "subjectivity" even, in a sense, personhood, of the "objects" surrounding us, requires imagination.   Another way to put it is that we need to engage in thought experimentation.  For instance, take the following hypothesis:  a river experiences the world and stands in relationship to me and everyone else.  If that is true, how can I understand what that experience is?  What does that mean for us?

The river by the bridge flows slowly these days.  The surface mirrors the sky.