What I Learned From Beavers About Forcing the Flow
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What eight beavers taught us about creative resistance, alignment, slow-building ideas, and why your best writing might not wait for the paperwork. Welcome to What I Learned From… “We tiptoed the tops of beaver dams, hopped hummocks, went wading, looked at spring flowers, tried to catcha snake, got lost and found. How fine it was to move at a meandery, child's pace.” — David Sobel What I Learned From …Eight beavers built a million-dollar engineering project in two days. The humans had been at it for seven years. The plan was to build a dam to protect the Klabava River in Czechia from sediment and acidic runoff. Environmental studies had been filed (twice), funding was secured (then reallocated, then re-secured), and departments were still trading paperwork. The site sat waiting…until one morning, there it was: a dam. Except no one on the payroll had built it. The beavers had simply shown up, taken one look at this mass of debris and runoff, and decided they couldn’t sit around and wait for the humans to get their act together and fix it. Instead, they got to work with their four incisors and a collective shrug that roughly translates to: “Fine. I guess we’ll have to handle this.” They read the river, chose the spot, and built a structure that
Jaroslav Obermajer of the Czech Nature and Landscape Protection Agency summed it up neatly: “Beavers always know best. The places where they build dams are always chosen just right — better than when we design it on paper.” This wasn’t luck, though. Beavers have been refining their craft for millions of years. North American beavers, for example, fell trees with their chisel teeth, and float the branches into place. Mud and stones seal the gaps, water backs up, and a deep pond forms. A dome-shaped lodge sits in the pond the dam creates (because no, beavers don’t live in the dams, they live in the water-moat) with underwater entrances that keep predators out and give the beavers safe exits if needed. Those ponds change everything around them. Beaver wetlands filter pollutants, store water for dry spells, and reduce flooding during heavy rains. They slow water so sediment settles, creating fertile ground for plants. They even blunt the spread of wildfires. In Canada, the world’s largest beaver dam (visible from space!) has been expanding for decades, turning a remote patch of Wood Buffalo National Park into a thriving, watery refuge. It’s also given Parks Canada their mascot, Parka the Wood Buffalo Beaver. The beavers don’t fight the current…they work with it. They find the place where the water already wants to pool, where the materials they need are close at hand, where their work will last because the river is helping to hold it together. I wish I could say I always approach my writing like that. More often, I’ve been the Klabava engineers clinging to my plan, even when it means forcing the work against its own current. I’ve sat at desks in half a dozen cities, staring at the blinking cursor, willing the words into existence. I tell myself the muse will arrive if I just keep pushing. It almost never works. What does work? Standing up. Folding laundry. Going for a walk. Sometimes, eating a bowl of Reese’s Puffs over the sink like my little beaver friends or making an entirely unnecessary afternoon tea spread when I should be typing. The moment I stop forcing it, the ideas seem to collect somewhere behind me, like a deep pool I didn’t realize I’d already built. I sit back down, and suddenly the words flow. Isn’t that always the way? We like to think great work comes from sheer force: pushing, grinding, muscling through. But the best work often comes from the beaver’s approach: finding the spot where the current already wants to slow and building there. It still takes effort, but it’s an effort in alignment with what we have and who we are. The Czech beavers didn’t replace human ingenuity. They reminded us that the land already knew what to do. Our creative work might go further if we listened for that first, rather than calling in the bulldozers. Before you hammer a piece into the shape you imagined, step back and see what shape it wants to take. You might find, as those engineers did, that the best solution has been quietly building itself all along. Because the work — the real, natural, crafted work — doesn’t wait for the paperwork to clear. It just starts building. Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. "But to change all existence into a flow experience, it is not sufficient to learn merely how to control moment-by-moment states of consciousness. It is also necessary to have an overall context of goals for the events of everyday life to make sense. If a person moves from one flow activity to another without a connecting order, it will be difficult at the end of one’s life to look back on the years past and find meaning in what has happened. To create harmony in whatever one does is the last task that the flow theory presents to those who wish to attain optimal experience; it is a task that involves transforming the entirety of life into a single flow activity, with unified goals that provide constant purpose." — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Your creative mind is a beaver lodge. Draw it! Where are the underwater entrances (secret inspirations)? What’s in the moat (defenses against distractions)? Is there a Netflix-watching room? BE HONEST HERE. Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Runnel [RUN-nəl] (n.) — A small stream or channel of water, especially one that forms naturally from the flow of a larger current. The word entered English in the 1500s, from Old English rynel (“a stream or course”), a diminutive of rīn (“a flow or run”). But the roots run deeper (though unattested, as we can't always verify proto languages): from Proto-Germanic runiz (“to course”), and even further back to the Proto-Indo-European root h₃er-, meaning “to flow, move, or run.” Once common in poetry and local speech, it has mostly dried up in modern usage. Not a river, not a brook, just a slender track built on quiet perseverance that the water carves when it’s left alone. Sorta synonyms: trickle, creek, streamlet Use it for: the side quest you didn’t mean to go on, the path your cat wore into the grass while contemplating your murder, that one idea that’s been slow-dripping in your brain since 2017 Want to read more in-depth Glossary entries? Catch up on the archives and find this week’s newest one. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Lefty’s Left Hand Store — Lefties like me, rejoice! Hot off International Left-Handers Day (August 13th) there’s an entire store of tools made just for you. From notebooks that don’t bite your wrist to scissors that actually work, stock up before the next bout of creative frustration. The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. At least my paws are out and being social? ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - Next week it’s a special WILF…our 300th newsletter! Should we get a cake to celebrate? Obviously pie? A ceremonial smashing of outdated writing advice? Tempted to do all three. |