I'm Robert Harrison for Entitled Opinions alongside producer Ty Davidian in the studios of KZSU,

ready to lift and drop a question on your plate about rivers.

What is a river?

Here is one highly distilled answer to that question from a verse in Gary Snyder's poem, Endless Streams and Mountains.

Mountains and rivers are spirit, condensed.

I take that to mean that rivers and mountains both move on the scales of the great cosmic serpent

that undulates through all things

terrestrial and non-terrestrial. To us, a mountain seems firm and fixed, yet it too flows

when you enlarge the view, the way A.R. Amunds does in his poem, Tombstones, where he writes,

In certain orders of time, stones blow by like the wind. Starlight pricks them like bubbles.

The neo-romantic German visionary Hans Juergen von der Vents expressed a similar thought in one of his diary entries.

Mountains are the chronicles of water, petrified oceans. All of our mountains once flew over us as clouds.

Mountains and rivers, stones and wind, all are fluvial, all flow at their own pace in spirits

differentiated currents.

Like countless people both past and present, I believe that the waters of our planet are

more than physical substance.

I believe that water is inspirited and that, in addition to being the source of life, it

is itself alive.

Every body of water, every river, breathes with its own inspiration.

The millions of people in northern India who revere the Ganges don't project onto that river, its superordinate cosmic nature.

They are receptive to something that emanates from the river itself.

The same goes for the Nile, the Danube, the Congo, and all other rivers,

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