Notes on the Seine, ancient water, and becoming a river person

On my last night in Paris, we made an offering to the Seine. We stood looking over the edge of the bridge, staring at the glassy water flowing beneath us, and slowly tossed dried leaves of sage and rosemary into the river. 

Over these last five weeks, there was something beautiful about living by such an ancient river, a river that humans have walked next to for thousands of years. Before coming to France, I knew how touristy and over romanticized this river was. But the Seine never felt as romantic to me as it just felt ancient – holding our romance too, maybe, but also holding so much of everything else. 

The Seine is named after Sequana, a Celtic and Roman goddess whose name means “the fast-flowing one.” The myth says that when Neptune, the god of the ocean, tried to rape Sequana, she turned herself into a river to escape his grasp. In around the first century BC, folks indigenous to this area built a shrine to her at the source of the river, around 20 miles from present-day Dijon. Pilgrims left carved sculptures near the river as offerings for her, believing the water to be healing. The name for the city of Paris also has to do with water: it comes from the Parisii tribe, a celtic word that means “small water boat.” 

Last year made me realize how much I’m a river person, that even as someone who has mostly lived on coastlines, I connect more deeply with rivers than any other source of water. My ancestors on both sides most likely lived in landlocked places, closer to rivers than oceans. Mexico City was a city of canals before the Spaniards came; the Rio Jalostitlan nourished the area where my ancestors lived for 500 years; my Andean ancestors lived in mountains near the Rio Chambo.

In the last year, I have had such transformative experiences near the Yuba, the Smith, the Rio Grande, Oak Creek – all rivers that taught me something this year about my body and my ancestors, messages I’m not sure I could have listened to in any other place. So last month, it made sense that on the December day I published an essay about sexual assault, I walked along the Seine for the first time – a survivor river, a river made as an act of bodily autonomy.  

What I find most beautiful about rivers is their own containment, how unlike oceans, their power comes not from their vastness but the opposite– there’s also magic in such a relatively small amount of water trickling through a city, traveling down different corners, touching everybody’s life. 

The friend I came to visit here used to visit the Seine every other day with their dog. In the five weeks I lived here, I listened to dozens of songs on my headphones while walking across bridge after bridge, laid on river-side benches and watched the clouds move as fast as they seem to move here. One time I caught locals dancing along the river bank, but I actually rarely saw anyone kiss near the river. Mostly, it was people walking alone, drinking coffee while staring out at the water, all of us feeling thousands of private feelings, thinking thousands of thoughts. Something about this river’s capacity to hold all of that, for millennia, also feels vast. Films and love stories have commodified this river more than most, but walking alongside it, I mostly felt its age, that it’s not a place to just recreate a scene from some movie, it’s a river, an old piece of earth who has accompanied folks here since the very beginning. 

A friend recently told me that rivers teach us a different way of letting go, a way that does not require the intense finality of burning, or burying something into the dirt. In rivers, we can release things through fluidity, in a way where they don’t dissolve or disappear, but instead just get carried towards somewhere new. I feel this when I walk beside them, this unique and lovely energy of a kind of release that has more hope than grief. 

That last night, I thanked the river for holding us these last five weeks. For reminding me of a vastness I can only feel with limits. For being an ancient water – over romanticized, commodified, and maybe overhyped, but still holding us as it has always done.

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If you care about nature, environmentalism, and climate change, you need to care about Palestine. To learn more specifically about how the genocide in Palestine connects to these issues, check out these amazing resources.

Digital toolkit on environmental justice in Palestine:
https://www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/toolkits/a-digital-toolkit-exploring-environmental-justice-in-palestine

Climate Change study on Gaza
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/emissions-gaza-israel-hamas-war-climate-change

General information on the effect of war on the environment: 

https://time.com/6148778/us-military-climate-change/

Environmental organization statements on Palestine:https://movementgeneration.org/the-path-to-ecological-justice-runs-through-a-free-palestine/
https://350.org/ceasing-fires-the-world-we-want-the-one-we-dont/
https://ittakesroots.org/ceasefire/