River beginnings

Justine Huxley writes about the experience of weaving her heart and mind together with a river and all their tributaries.

Today I am beginning something new.  As I lie on my back by the river’s edge underneath a towering willow tree, it seems like a good day for new beginnings.  The tree's curtains of wispy branches, with their slim, pale green leaves, fall around me, and stretch downwards dipping into the water.  Breeze and movement create gaps in the curtain where the early afternoon sun sparkles through.  From time to time the branches brush my face in a friendly greeting.  

Over the last month, this river, River Lea, has taken over my heart and mind.  As my partner and I prepare to move our house and lives to a new location bang in the middle of the Lea’s forty-two mile course between source and mouth,  I can feel the London tube map, that conduit of many thousands of my daily movements, something I have lived with for decades, receding.  In its place is growing a different map, one that is infinitely older and more dynamic.  Its shape is slowly coming into focus and taking up more and more of my inner space.  The new shape is a fan of more than forty-five tributaries feeding into a complex network of lakes, reservoirs, wetlands and marshes; and a long North-South corridor of braided, anastomosing river channels, loops and navigations that come together and separate countless times on their journey to meet London’s mother of all rivers - River Thames.

My whole identity and sense of who I am and how I might work is rapidly being claimed by this shape I am coming to know from so many different angles.  She was first, and for many years, a set of riverside and tow paths to walk on.  Then the closest place to kayak.  Then an ecology of beings - kingfishers and sedge warblers; dragonflies and mayfly; reeds and bullrushes; pike, eels and barbel.  More recently, she became a pattern I’ve been endlessly drawing, painting, learning and etching into my memory with unexpected determination.  I’m also discovering her as a collection of stories, human and more than, riddled with the hints embedded in language and names - celtic, pre-celtic, Latin, old English.  Now, slowly coming into focus as a living being, an endlessly shifting creature with character and her own kind of knowledge - inseparable from her journey and the vast water cycles she is part of, but also her own unique presence.  (Later I will begin taking her into my body, by collecting river water, distilling it, filtering it through activated charcoal to make it drinkable, and dosing myself daily with a ‘river dieta’.  But today I am still with simple offerings and that lies ahead of me). 

It makes intuitive sense to me that our true identities as humans should be bound up with river basins.  Even if we’re no longer taught it, a river basin is a living system, an entity, a coherent, bounded ecology.  For most of human history, this was how we understood our place in the world. To know where you lived was to know your watershed. The first pathways were riverbanks. The first settlements were at fords and confluences. Trade followed the flow of the current. Rivers fed us, watered our fields, shaped our festivals, and gave us our boundaries. Cultures were born in relationship with rivers.  

Thinking bioregionally is to re-shape our lives to the ecological boundaries that actually sustain us, to step outside the arbitrary lines of counties, districts, and political borders, and instead orient to the contours of land, soil, and watercourse.  This then is the most natural scale for belonging and also for changemaking.  We learn we are downstream from some places and upstream from others, and that what we do here, matters there. It means knowing that the health of our own lives are entangled with the health of this greater life.  To belong to a river basin is to belong to a living, breathing, moving body of relationships. 

One way to begin this reorienting of identity and re-building of connection is to visit every tributary in your basin and make an offering.  This is what I came here for today, to Hertford, where four of those tributaries - Beane, Mimram, Rib and Quin - meet my River Lea.  So, after a while, I sit up from my willow reverie and begin my task.  Inwardly, offering feels private and intimate, like speaking first words to a lover one could spend the rest of your life with.  Outwardly, it’s simple. I light incense and place it in the ground, letting the perfume mix with the outdoor smells, instantly changing the atmosphere.  I introduce myself once again, with careful humility and the intention to listen.  In the film about the Whanganui,  ‘I am the river and the river is me’, the Mauri elder explains how in their culture when they move along a river by canoe, they take a small branch of greenery from the banks of the place they leave, and offer it to the place where they arrive, to guarantee safe passage.  Somehow, I’ve always done something similar, taking something of the Earth from my home as a way of introducing myself in other places.  So I have rose petals from my garden which I scatter and watch rapidly disappear downstream.  (Two male and female shoveller ducks approach me hopefully, and I make a note to bring edible offerings for them next time).  I have grass seeds and acorns for the bank.  Lastly, I tie a golden yellow thread and a dark green thread of pure chunky wool to the lower branches of the willow, and make my prayers.  For Her forgiveness of our destructive human hubris.  For a reweaving of our relationship with Earth and all Her beings.  And to be shown how I might come to know and serve this winding, multi-faced, majestic movement of water and light, aliveness and memory - that is River. 

A loud splosh right next to me causes me to jerk open my eyes.  A black cormorant rises fast out of the green water, a silver fish flailing helplessly in his yellow and grey beak.  His eyes are triumphant.  

As I walk slowly back to the car I feel subtly different.  Less an individual, and more a thread in a much bigger story.  A deeper weaving has begun, which I know will change me beyond what I currently understand, and change my work with Kincentric Leadership - and how I think about kinship with all life.  I’m also wondering, in a more personal way….if this becomes an intimate relationship, if her intelligence begins to speak with me…what will she say?

My journey with River Lea has begun.    

This blog was first published by Weaving Rivers in August 2025.

Justine Afra Huxley is is a writer, facilitator and spiritual ecologist whose core passion is awakening humanity to a deeper experience of kinship with all life. She co-founded Kincentric Leadership and leads workshops, retreats, and trainings on aligning leadership and decision-making with Earth-based wisdom. In 2026, Justine will be launching a strand of work aiming to bring animist and kincentric approaches to consevationists, cultural creatives, and community organisers who live or work within the River Lea basin, with a view to seeding the idea of rights for rivers.   Kincentric Leadership has recently published a 400 page handbook on how to cocreate with a living intelligent Earth.  You can download it for free here.  Rooted in a Sufi tradition, she has led meditation and dreamwork groups for more than two decades, continually orienting spiritual practice towards reweaving our relationship with a sacred, living Earth.  She has a PhD in psychology and for many years led St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in London, orienting its work towards the intersection of peace-making, ecology and spirituality.