Avulsion
On love, erosion, and the ground beneath our feet
“Love is the light in which we see each thing in its true origin, nature and destiny. If we could look at the world in a loving way, it would rise up before us full of invitation, possibility, and depth.”
— Anam Cara: A Celtic Book of Wisdom, John O’Donohue
One day, the river is following the channel it has followed for years. The next, it has broken through its bank and begun flowing somewhere entirely new, abandoning the course that once seemed permanent. This sudden rerouting is called an avulsion.
To anyone arriving afterward, it can look as though the story begins at the breach—as though one unexpected disruption changed everything.
For years, I thought the avulsions in my own life began this way—with the visible ending, the difficult conversation, the need or difference that seemed to cause the breakup or the resignation or the move. I thought something had gone wrong in those final moments, as though one obstacle had diverted the course of my life.
But an avulsion is rarely caused by an obstruction alone.
In a meandering river, a cut bank and a point bar are two sides of the same riverbed: one side gives way, the other receives what is carried. If that pattern continues too long in one direction, the channel begins to organize itself around imbalance.
The river does not abandon its course simply because something appears in its path. It often leaves when the channel has already become too unstable to carry what is moving through it.
Looking back now, I think the real story was not the final moment when everything changed. It was the years I spent silently giving away the ground beneath my own feet.
A Shared Channel
I think of every relationship as a shared river channel.
I think this applies to families, workplaces, and callings too, but I have come to understand it most clearly through romantic love—through the experience of trying to build a life beside another person.
Each person arrives with their own bank already formed by their lifetime of currents. We carry our rhythms, fears, capacities, histories, and ways of moving through the world.
The water is the love, care, belonging, and security that can flow to us through relationship. But water can only move between two banks if there is a channel to carry it.
When two people meet, that channel is not yet formed—it must be built. It is shaped over time by the way each person responds to what the relationship reveals.
And every river has boulders.
A difference rises in the riverbed. A need surfaces. A limit appears where the water had been moving easily. A fear asks for reassurance. A body needs rest. A dream needs more space. A season of illness, grief, caregiving, or change requires a different shape than the one that came before.
The question is not whether boulders will appear.
The question is how both banks will respond when they do.
Building from My Own Bank
Somewhere along the way, I learned that my boulders did not belong in the river. At least, not in their raw, rugged, exposed form.
If something rose from my side of the channel—a limit, a longing, a sensitivity, a desire—I tried to soften or bury it before it disturbed the flow.
If something rose from the other side though, I did my best to make space and widen around it, absorbing the adjustment myself.
I treated my own inner landscape as something to manage quietly and another person’s landscape as something to honor by giving more of myself. And I tried to make all of it look effortless.
I hid the work of tending my boulders, the ground it took to carry them, and the widening required to help carry someone else’s too. I thought that was how I became worthy of another’s water. If my effort looked natural enough, if my boulders stayed smooth enough, if my ground appeared endlessly available, then maybe no one would question whether I belonged.
I did not yet know where adaptation ended and disappearance began. So I kept pouring my shoreline into the riverbed and calling it devotion.
For a while, it worked. The water kept moving. The relationship appeared smooth, the life appeared workable, the channel appeared intact.
When the River Changes Course
For years, it seemed like the channel could carry my boulders—but only because I kept covering them with my own ground.
I treated what rose in me as negotiable because I believed it should be. I thought I should be able to soften its edges, make it less disruptive, and keep the water flowing without asking too much of the other bank.
So when one need finally rose in a way I could no longer manage alone, it felt as though a tree had fallen across the channel, blocking the river from continuing forward in the same way.
The old current could not continue. Slowly, I had become the cut bank. I had made the other bank the point around which the river turned. So when the other bank did not widen in the way I needed, when it could not offer ground, the bank gave way.
Against my desire, the river rerouted because it had to. The moment of avulsion had arrived.
At first, the avulsion felt like rejection, then injustice, and then proof that I had not been enough. But eventually, I began to wonder whether it was also protection.
In moving water, a fallen tree can become a strainer: water passes through, but a body can be trapped against it and held under. Maybe the avulsion was saving me from a channel where I was willing to lose myself in order to keep the water moving.
Looking Back at the Old Channels
For a long time, I thought the reason I kept finding myself in avulsing channels was simply bad luck, choosing the wrong people, or meeting the right people at the wrong time.
I had not yet considered that the channels themselves might be mirrors, revealing what I already believed about my own inner landscape.
Because I believed the water I needed lived on someone else’s bank, I had learned to abandon my own ground in order to stay close to it. I entered each new channel with the same hidden contract: that belonging had to be earned by becoming easy enough to love.
I believed my boulders were disruptions before someone else treated them that way. I believed my limits made me unworthy before someone else experienced them as incompatibility. So when another person seemed to experience a need as too much, it felt like confirmation of what I already feared about myself.
When each avulsion came, my landscape was never prepared for the flood. I was so desperate to find safer ground that I often moved too quickly into the next channel to let the water settle enough to show me my own reflection.
But when I finally looked back, I saw that perhaps the river was trying to set me free from an unsustainable pattern that I could not yet see clearly. Because even if the other bank had widened in that final moment, I may have kept believing I had to sacrifice myself first in order to deserve it.
Entering Shared Channels Differently
I am beginning to realize that a river does not become more worthy of passage by burying its boulders. It only loses the fullness of its own landscape.
Boulders shape the current and they oxygenate the water. They create pools, eddies, shelter, and importantly—song.
My needs, limits, wounds, desires, dreams, sensitivities, and boundaries are the notes the water was given to play through my particular life. When I bury them, I don’t become easier to love—I become harder to find. The river goes quiet. I lose the frequency that calls what is meant for me toward me.
I think that the boulders I tried hardest to manage alone were the very places where love was meant to meet me. They were not obstacles to partnership. They were invitations back into the truth of what partnership requires: not only water, but a riverbed shaped by both banks.
I now see that the river was never taking me away from the water I needed. It was returning me to my own ground, where love, belonging, and security were already waiting in my own well.
Now I no longer need to enter shared channels in search of myself. I can enter with the whole of myself, trusting that as I learn to love and make space for what is true in me, the river will carry me toward banks that can do the same.
Thanks for reading My Waterful Life!
Another well thought out and written analogy. You are an extraordinary young lady and have so much to offer that someone out there is going to be very fortunate when the two of you finally meet and you both realize you've found the river you want to traverse together for life. Don't settle for less than what you want and deserve.
Love this line: "When I bury them, I don’t become easier to love—I become harder to find."