The Flow of Intention

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"Is it just because you feel connected to each other, or is it possible for all of us to send our intentions out that way?" There was that word again: intention.

Well, we had to agree that a special sense of connection helps. But we told him we also believe that people are constantly sending out ripples and have the power to do it consciously. As our conversation unfolded, I realized that Richard and I were being accorded the status of elders. Michael was asking heartfelt questions about our core beliefs, and I believed what I was saying in response more deeply than ever before.

That night, on the beach, I told the group I hoped to write about intention, and told them they had to find a way to end my story. We all laughed at my demand and then we laid out our sleeping bags and pads in that moonlit canyon and fell asleep under the stars.

The next day, we had one last set of rapids to run, an intimidating new stretch formed by a landslide the year before. As we approached the white water, Jesse, the guide, stood up in the stern of a paddleboat to address us. He started to say that we could take the beauty and power of the river with us if we chose to, but his words were cut short when the boat lurched and nearly threw him over. I took it as one final lesson on the nature of intention -- it's not always synonymous with having things (like endings) just they way we want them. The river has its say.

In one last brush with the river's power, the safest boat in our flotilla, the oar boat, flipped in the last rapids, but we all made it out. Off the water, we boarded a bus. Soon thereafter we were peeling off in every direction across the country, trailing our sense of connection like the wisps whirling off Veil Falls.

So what did I take from the river? Certainly joy and respite, but, beyond that, a deepening faith in the flow of life itself. And a more refined set of core beliefs: There is a current that is taking us somewhere, and there is a creative intelligence underlying it.

As I thought back over the trip, I remembered that rock in the middle of the current and finally understood its message to me. That rock and our intentions are much alike. They change everything that happens downstream in large and subtle ways. And yet they too are mutable in the endless process of things, ground down or pushed on by landslides and other forces of nature. We plant our willful intentions like rocks in the stream, but then we leave them behind in what amounts to an act of faith in the power or the energy or the love that bears everything along. We know that we are in that flow when we feel ourselves to be surrounded by strength and ease, carried by the current like the deer crossing the river. When we're touched by beauty and magic. When synchronicity tickles us. And when we're bounced out of the boat but still come up laughing.

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