The Law of Rivers

A Meditation and Reflection from September, 2024

In these summer throwbacks we are revisiting past meditations and reflections, delivered every Friday at our regular time, 9 am EST.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is one of those poems that we came across at eighteen or twenty which seems to leap across time and experience to make direct contact with the heart. Written by Hughes when he was seventeen while traveling down to Mexico to meet his father, it is a poem—first, but not only—about nonduality. The speaker is very old, thousands of years old. The speaker is very young, a teenager. The river is change itself, as Heraclitus said. Yet the river is all rivers: the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Mississippi. It was published when Hughes was twenty in 1921.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

by Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

It is not hard to see the poetic lineage from which this poem arises. The conversation it creates with Whitman’s “I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing” is marvelous. In 1848 Walt Whitman travels down to New Orleans and sees a live oak bursting with joyous leaves, all alone, and takes home a relic from the tree to remind him of his own self-effulgence. He publishes his poem on unity and community in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. Hughes travels down through the American South in 1918 and has a moment of communion with the Mississippi River. He publishes his poem just after the First World War. A different kind of experience than Whitman’s, a white man’s in Louisiana. But the voice is eerily similar. It uses repetition: Whitman’s “though I could not” and Hughes’ “I’ve known rivers.” It uses a free verse form not yet universally accepted, still on the cutting edge of American poetics. It grabs an American idiom with those long lines, and the naming of places: each employing the same lyrical “I” which is both personal and universal.

“The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is about looking deeply into suffering and transforming it into gold. “I’ve heard the singing of the Mississippi…” he writes, “and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.” What is this work from the Buddhist perspective? Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “The way out of your suffering depends on how you look at it: that is why you have to embrace your suffering, hold it close to your chest, and look deeply into it.” By looking deeply into rivers, Hughes takes one source of generational trauma—the Mississippi—and uses it as a way to connect back to Egypt and Mesopotamia, to reflect on the contributions of Black life on civilizations through time and across the world.

At the time of his writing, as Hughes was traveling south, the Great Migration was taking place in the United States. Millions of African Americans were pulling up stakes in the deep American South and relocating in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and New York. The early twentieth century American artist Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series beautifully, poignantly depicts this historical crossroads. Half of the series, complete with each description, can be found at The Philips Gallery in Dupont Circle in Washington. I have stood in that room many times, the work encircling me. Lawrence depicts the crowds at train stations pouring through turnstiles like a river pouring out of Southern headwaters toward their scattered, uncertain destinations.

The Buddha taught that he had three bodies: one of joy; one the dharma or the law; and one the physical body of this historical figure. To know the dharmakaya we must look deeply into things, the way a translator steps inside their source work and rolls around like Harold Lloyd inside a clock, seeing it, knowing it, profoundly, from the inside. It is not merely enough to “see” rivers to look deeply into Hughes’ subject; we must, like he did, “know rivers.” We see the river as a function of the outside world. We know the river as an embodiment of the dharma. The river asks us to embrace our suffering, to allow it space, to let it be, or let it go. As one critic put it, Hughes’ poem makes space for “a new kind of rootedness that embraces migration and change.”

“People who are awake,” Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “can hear the dharma being preached in a pebble or the cry of a baby.” When we look deeply into anything—making bread, for example—we understand that yeast, water, and flour are operating by a force of creation preceding them, but also within them, all the smallest portions bonding and expanding on their own. Our bodies are doing the same, down to the mitochondria, the beating of the heart, the autonomic breathing in and breathing out. Those who are mindful might feel their surroundings the way Hughes knows rivers beyond what any personal experience might have taught him.

Oars for the Boat

We are fortunate to have a recording of Hughes reading the poem himself. Hearing him, an older man, reading the words of his younger self, I reflect back on the ways this poem reorients me to my own state of mind forty years ago when I first read “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Poems speak to us by a dharma of their own. Why do we remember some and let others go? They may stay with us because something in us knows that in the future they will be useful; they can float, so to speak, on all of the aggregates of the self, from the body with its rhythms, the thoughts and emotions, the perceptions and scars we bear, offering solace and spaciousness, and they may even touch the consciousness that watches it all, ageless and connected to the past, the present, and what is to come.

We all have our version of Hughes' rivers. In meditation, our thoughts come from old stories and pass before our eyes. They move like a river, changing and rearranging, and though they seem identical, we never step into the same thoughts twice. We might ask: where are the headwaters of thoughts? It’s said that the brain secretes thoughts like the mouth secretes saliva. Thoughts are a function of the organ, but their content often (perhaps always) have come from other sources, other rivers, an ancestral ocean of concepts and beliefs passed down to us which we falsely take on as our own.

I've heard it said by many teachers that anything that changes isn’t real. There is an ultimate, nameless reality—sometimes called "suchness" or tathata—and there is the relative reality made up of separation and impermanence. Langston Hughes managed—whether he recognized it as such a young man—to reach through the seeing of rivers to knowing the one within the many, the riverness that does not change, the current of energy that bonds and creates continually in the here and now, where we live, or nowhere.