Sorry for my absence · YES YOU CAN!

Sorry for my absence

The River, the Stars, and Another Year of Life

This morning, on my birthday, I woke up early wanting some peace. Lately, the river has been teaching me things about life just by watching it flow. I’ve been finding little lessons in nature, in the way things move, grow, and exist without needing to explain themselves. So I decided to go sit by the river and spend some time with my thoughts.

I found a quiet spot along the riverbank, surrounded by trees and rocks, where I could sit without being bothered. I felt peaceful, but I was also a little anxious and curious. Before anything happened, I remember thinking, “I don’t know what I’m doing with myself right now.” I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to be there and experience the morning.

Around 6:23 AM, I happened to look up and notice three stars. I wasn’t looking for Orion. I just looked up and saw them. Once I recognized the pattern, I got curious and started looking into whether Orion was visible from where I was. I had studied Orion’s Belt before because the birthmarks on my body remind me of it, but I hadn’t really been thinking about it lately. Still, there I was, sitting by the river on my birthday, looking at something I had once spent time studying.

I started wondering if there was something meaningful about the moment or if it was just a coincidence. I didn’t want to assume I knew what it meant, but I couldn’t help thinking about it. There was this feeling that something existed beyond what I could understand, something watching, something speaking, something continuing whether I understood it or not.

Then Amos 5:8 came to mind: “Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning.” I knew Orion was also mentioned in Job, and I started thinking about why the stars were important enough to be mentioned in Scripture. People have looked up at the same sky for thousands of years, giving the stars different names and meanings. But for me, the thought that stayed with me was the Creator behind them.

I believe there is a God above all, a Source from which everything comes. I also believe different cultures have recognized and named different gods and spiritual forces throughout history. I don’t think we have to deny what other cultures believed just because we choose not to worship their gods. For me, recognizing something and worshipping it are two different things. The stars may carry different meanings to different people, but I believe those meanings can still point back toward something greater. It reminds me of a prism: the colours look different, but they all come from the same light.

I kept watching Orion on and off between 6:23 and 7:07. Around seven, I spent several minutes staring at the stars, trying to watch them disappear as the sun came up. Eventually, I stopped because I felt like I was staring too hard. By around 7:07, they had faded from view. They hadn’t stopped existing; the daylight had simply made them harder to see. That made me think about how something can still be there even when we can no longer see it.

While I was sitting there, I suddenly heard a loud splash about one or two metres away from me. At first, I thought it was a fish hitting the water with its tail. Then I noticed a dark, bulb-shaped head and part of a body, half in and half out of the water. It was a snake. It blended into the darkness of the river so well that I could barely make out its shape. I wondered if it had fallen from one of the nearby trees, but I never actually saw it happen.

For a few seconds, we stared at each other while I tried to figure out what I was looking at. The snake swam toward the middle of the river, then came back toward the bank farther downstream. I thought it gave me a side-eye, though it might have just been moving against the current. Eventually, I lost sight of it. I never saw whether it came out of the water. The whole thing fascinated me more than it frightened me.

Of course, seeing a snake brought my mind back to the symbolism I’ve been studying. In the story of Eden, the serpent is connected to the knowledge of good and evil. But the serpent appears elsewhere in the Bible, too. Moses lifted up a bronze serpent in the wilderness, and Jesus later referred to it in John 3:14–15. The same image can carry different meanings depending on the story. I’ve also studied serpent imagery in other traditions, especially its connections to wisdom and healing. It makes me wonder how much meaning we miss when we decide that a symbol can only represent one thing.

The trees around me made me think about ourselves. I often see a tree as a reflection of our own nature. Its roots grow into the darkness of the earth while its branches reach toward the light. But reaching toward the light is only part of the process. What matters is what the tree eventually produces. We can gain knowledge and still become prideful. We can grow without necessarily growing wiser. Sometimes, we need to pay attention not only to how far we’ve grown, but also to what we’re feeding ourselves and what kind of fruit we’re producing.

Then there’s the water. To me, water represents life, but it also represents the unknown. It’s something we depend on, yet something that can overwhelm us. I think about the ancient ideas of the waters above and below, and how water can reflect our emotions. Sometimes we’re calm, and sometimes we’re so overwhelmed that we feel like we’re drowning. But the river keeps flowing. Leaves fall into it and get carried along, through calm waters and rough ones. Sometimes I think we need to learn to be like those leaves. We can’t control every current, but we can keep moving through life instead of fighting everything that comes our way.

I also heard an owl calling from the trees that morning. When I think back on it, I realize how much I experienced without ever planning to. The stars were there. The river was flowing. The snake was living its life. The owl was calling from the trees. The sun was coming up, and the world was carrying on as it always does.

None of these things needed to stop and question what they were doing. The stars didn’t need to understand why they were there. The river didn’t need to know where every drop of water was going. The snake didn’t need to explain why it was swimming. They simply existed, moving as life moved around them.

And that made me think about myself. Where am I going? What am I moving toward? What am I moving forward on? Sometimes I spend so much time trying to understand life that I forget to actually live it. I went to sit beside a river, and I ended up experiencing things I never expected. I saw the stars, watched the sky grow brighter, encountered a snake, heard an owl, and sat among the trees. None of that was planned. I simply showed up, and life happened around me.

Maybe that’s part of why the morning meant so much to me. It was my birthday, but I don’t think a birthday needs to have some special physical meaning to be worth celebrating. To me, it’s a reminder that the Creator brought me into existence on that day. And honestly, why should we only celebrate that once a year? Every day we wake up is another opportunity to experience creation. We get to breathe, see, feel, learn, and experience things we’ve never experienced before. We get another day that was never promised to us.

I still don’t know whether everything that happened that morning was connected or whether some of it was coincidence. I don’t want to force a meaning onto every little thing. I’d rather pay attention, reflect on what I experience, and see whether certain patterns continue to show up in my life. But I do believe there’s something meaningful about stepping back and looking at everything together instead of focusing on each thing separately.

The stars, the trees, the water, the snake, the owl, and the rising sun are all different, but they share the same world. They all exist within the same creation. And when I look at them that way, I’m reminded of the Creator behind it all. I don’t have to understand every part of creation to appreciate it, and I don’t have to know exactly what something means to learn from experiencing it.

Everything moves. The river flows, the Earth turns, the stars fade from our sight as the morning comes, and life continues. Whether we understand where everything is going or not, we’re part of that movement, too.

That morning reminded me that life isn’t always about finding an answer. Sometimes it’s about being present enough to experience what’s in front of you. I went to sit by a river because I wanted some peace, and I got to experience a morning I never could have planned.

I got another day to breathe. Another day to wonder. Another day to learn. Another year of life.

And maybe, for now, that’s enough.

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Sorry for my absence