"[S]imply walking along a river can be an adventure, a solace, an exercise, a joy."

"The breadth of one's awareness expands and attends to the important things in life one often passes by — how the cottonwood leans, how the trout lurks, how the butterfly wafts and drifts, how the water currents swirl and eddy, how a leaf floats stem up, how tufted seeds float to new shores to begin a new willow. The river is the ultimate agent of change and flow, of life itself as change and flow."

Quotations from It Flows Along Forever by Ann Zwinger, published in Orion Magazine, Summer 1996.