The River that Remembered Herself
THE VISUAL HEALING LIBRARY
Flow like the River Aller
I was lying in bed thinking about what I might share in this next Vision Book - and this story came on the morning radio...
It’s the story of how the River Aller in Somerset UK was released from the artificial constraints of "straightening" so she could regain her natural curvy meander and flow.
The River Aller had become a deadened river. It flooded regularly, had very few fish, almost no insect life, which in turn fed very few birds and a low level of microbial diversity that was indicative of an unhealthy water course.
Like many rivers in the UK it had also become a dumping ground for run-off chemicals from farm waste.
Alongside of all the ills inflicted on the The River Aller - it had been straight jacketed into an unnatural mean-spirited line that meant when it rained the banks often collapsed due to the intensity and speed of the water running unnaturally straight.
What happened next:
The River Reset
“A section of the River Aller has been liberated from its narrow artificial channel. This allows the water to find its own way — creating streams, pools, and boggy ground. The slower flow makes flooding less probable downstream, and the landscape has become rich with life.” — The Guardian, Sept 2023
Six weeks after the “river reset,” the transformation was staggering. Fields that had been dry and barren were now wet, vibrant, and full of movement. Hundreds of swallows and house martins arrived to feast on the new clouds of insects; white egrets returned; buzzards and kestrels circled above. Dragonflies skated over the water, and fish - even eel - began to make their way home again.
As project manager Ben Eardley said:
“You don’t know what you’ve lost until you see what you can have. Wetlands are like rainforests - dense with life and able to store carbon. By seeing the river and its landscape as a whole, we can build resilience and restore biodiversity.”
Stage 0: Letting the River Remember
The Stage 0 approach to river restoration, developed in the U.S., aims to return rivers to their pre-channelled, natural multi-threaded state - before human hands confined them to narrow channels.
Instead of dredging or straightening, the engineered banks are lowered or removed. The river is allowed to reconnect with its natural floodplain, creating a mosaic of shallow flows, pools, and vegetated channels. In essence, the river is invited to remember how to shape herself.
If we can learn from the River Aller, we can see that when something - whether a river, a person, or a creative practice finds its own natural shape, something alive, messy, capable of both generativity and multiplicity flows.
Biomimicry and Radical Ecology
Over the last few decades, one of the most exciting developments in the field of Radical Ecology is Biomimicry - the study of nature’s patterns and designs as intricate complex systems in their own right transposed as blueprints for solving complex problems in the human world.
By observing the way a maple seed spins as it falls, scientists have reimagined the aerodynamic design of helicopter as well as wind-turbine blades. By studying termite mounds in Zimbabwe, architects have created natural cooling systems for large buildings that need no air conditioning.
Natural aliveness doesn’t just nourish itself - it feeds other life: insects, birds, fungi, wildflowers, and mammals - and us.
Biomimicry is not only a practical solutions-based discipline - it opens a portal into the neural mirror resonance we share in our own bodies with all living systems.
When we attune to these patterns - the branching of rivers, the spirals of shells, the cellular geometry of trees - something in our own neural architecture begins to remember. We re-embed ourselves in the intelligence of all life.
We can learn not only how to build more sustainable cities and communities, but how to live more coherently with the world’s own pattern-making wisdom. True solutions come from resonating with living intelligence, not applying mechanised band-aids.
(There’s a wonderful TED talk on this by Janine Benyus, if you’d like to explore further.)
The Visual Medicine™ Parallel
When we liberate the inner river - when we stop trying to control the flow of image, word, or feeling - the channel widens, becoming braided, alive, self-renewing.
What seemed chaotic or “messy” begins to reveal its own innate coherence.
We discover that life, like the painting, knows how to organise itself if we simply create space for it to move.
Visual Medicine™ is a kind of Stage 0 for the psyche - a restoration practice that returns us to the natural intelligence of creation.
When we lower the engineered banks of expectation or self-critique, the river of imagination finds its own course. The field rebalances.
Biodiversity returns in the form of flowing images, sensations, insights, and ancestral voices. And in that reconnection, we feed more than ourselves: we rejoin the living pattern of the world.
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