"We all live downstream."

Ecologically, culturally and personally, it's inescapable that none of us stands isolated: We're part of a riparian flow of events, choices and consequences.

The sea contains elements closely echoing the mineral soup of our blood and speaks of our origins and destination, but it is huge, unfathomable, rather than remotely comprehensible. The metaphor of the river is compelling, mythological, poetic. We have always known we were mid-stream - between banks and between origin and destination.

Much has come downstream to us. We contribute to the flow, and beyond us are others, receiving and contributing. However we think of the river as time, lives, history or a physical water force, the symbolism is compelling.

In Celtic Ireland there were no glacier-fed streams. Wherever they emerged, life flourished. Each spring or well had its name and certain properties associated. This one was known to ease the ache of winter-punished joints. That one refreshed the skin so that it was beautiful as that of a newborn. Rills, brooks and rivers came from the breast of Earth in bubbling springs between limestone rocks, in groves of sheltering beech, oak and yew, in sun-swept meadows and among the dunes of the storm-embattled coast. Each had its own character, but collectively the springs were known as the waters of life. Gifts were laid on the stones and no one defiled the precious force. We have always sensed we are largely water ourselves.

It is simple to observe that water has a comforting certainty as to its direction. Unlike us who are presented with the bewildering complexity of choices created by the union of free will and consciousness, water knows with inevitable intuition that it will eventually reach the sea or the sky.

In its movement after emergence from the flesh of Earth, it gathers speed and volume according the slope of ground; the presence of other streams answers the same call, join forces. Life on Earth, and nothing less, is the child of rivers, rain and ocean. Every body of water not perverted and violated by unnatural interference nurtures simple, invisible life forms which nourish larger, more complex expressions of life.

Rivers rush and rest, pool and cascade, erode and create. They begin individually and terminate in the immense, undifferentiated unity of Mother Ocean. They are subject to stagnation, logjams, deadly contamination, freezing, solar gain, filtration, violent falls, free flows, and aerating cascades. Uncountable forces influence them, but they are never confused as to their origins and their destinations. Unlike us.

At this strange and surely transient moment of human history, perhaps as prequel to extinction, we must consider the consequence of our relationship with the literal and metaphorical Waters of Life. If we consider the likeness of our essential DNA to other life forms - we have more in common with salmon than we have variation, in the language of nature - then we must consider the consequences of our choices.

When a watershed is stripped indecently bare in unconscionable, greedy plunder, followed by spraying, scalping, disruption of springs, fouling with petrochemicals and human wastes, violation in spirit and body, then more than trees and trilliums, voles and red tail hawks are disrupted and destroyed. Downstream, the algae-eating snails die, because there is so little life in the water. Crawdad and lamprey vanish. Heron and raccoon go hungry. Salmon and steelhead eggs suffocate in the rivers of silt laid down on their spawning beds. Bear go hungry. We dither at legalisms while life is exterminated.

We all live downstream. We receive as an inevitable part of the flow what has preceded and effected our river. We are not neutral presences, we too are contributors. The only real question is are we filters, helping to cleanse what has fouled our stream, or are we unconscious of our responsibility to keep the clean river flowing?

Do we nurture and reverence life or do we carelessly leave it to others with less-pressing business than our own ever-so-important affairs?

The Iroquois thought in terms of the "seventh generation" after their own time. This is another way of considering what we are sending downstream.

Caught by the metaphoric truth that each life is a river, reflect on the awesome responsibility and power represented by each of us as rivulets of thought, energy, potential, blessing and hope. Then act on what you already know.

Peg Elliott Mayo writes from the Coast Range. She invites comment at uncommonideas@rivervoices.com and readers to her blog: www.peak.org/~pegmayo/