My Column in Spirituality & Health

As a thank you to subscribers

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As a special thank you to my paid subscribers I always share my column in Spirituality & Health magazine. In the May/June issue the column is titled, The Wisdom of Release & Flow, and tells the story of my visit to the largest dam removal project in U.S. history and the surprisingly rapid return of wild salmon. There are many lessons, both ecological and spiritual. Enjoy!

First published in Spirituality & Health, May/June 2025

I recently travelled to the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. Just a month before my arrival, the fourth and final hydroelectric dam had been removed from the Klamath River on the Oregon California border.

In the mid-1800s the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa tribes were forced onto a reservation in the lower Klamath Basin. Over the next century they watched as the dams went up and salmon, blocked from their spawning grounds, disappeared from one of the three most prolific salmon runs on the West Coast.

Environmentalists and the tribes worked, unsuccessfully, for years, for removal of the dams. As happens, circumstances change and consciousness shifts. In the early 2000s, facing steep costs to bring the aging dams up to federal code, Pacificorp announced it would consider removing rather than repairing them. The rest is, literally, history in the making.

As I rounded the final corner on the steep, winding, gravel road and first glimpsed the wild river running where a megalithic dam had stood just weeks before, tears welled. It snaked, free-flowing, through the bottom of a wide denuded canyon that, a month earlier, had been underwater. Bare beige dirt stretched upward from the river until reaching the tree-line above the scoured flood zone. Already, a ribbon of verdant vegetation was sprouting and spreading along the riverbank.

Downstream, I stopped to touch the river and send blessings and gratitude. The water was turbid and dark from churning and flushing a century of sediment. I was witnessing, in real time, a river and landscape in the process of healing.

Like rivers, we humans fill with sludge when we allow ourselves to resist the flow of life. I’ve heard it said the opposite of life isn’t death but stagnation. A Course in Miracles (ACIM) teaches that giving and receiving are the same and I’ve found that true whether the giving is of love, a helping hand, holding prayer and positive intention for someone, or helping ease a loved-one’s financial stress. It’s all about flow. Another line I love from ACIM is, “clearing space on the altars of our minds.” My personal journey has been a doozy of releasing old beliefs and programming, letting them flow away, so that more authentic, peaceful offerings can flow onto the inner altar.