The River Maker (Creatures of Grief Series) is a grieving mountain, an ancient and seemingly eternal witness, whose tears of grief are the source of Life giving Rivers. The River Maker turns swamps and deserts into flowing streams and colorful blossoms. Its vast and deep ability to grieve is an offering on the altar of Courage and Love.

The River Maker came to me in January 2024, when I lost my grand mother, towards whom I have felt both deep love, yearning and profound attachement, as well as anger, hatred and mistrust. She was an active complicit in crimes of incest perpetrated against me by my grand father when I was a child. She was someone I had both compassion and rage for. Someone who brought up in me feelings of ultimate betrayal and injustice as well as my inner child’s unmet yearning to belong with her and be loved by her. And as I grew up, the painful awareness that I had been sacrificed and abandonned on the altar of their own darkness, so that they could hold on to their warped sense of self and reality and avoid facing themsleves with all that they truly were: a lot of Light, and a lot of Darkness.

This fate, of being sacrificed as the scapegoat for the group’s shadow, is a fate that a lot of children seem to be condemned to in our culture.

The grieving process has been a mind and heart expanding journey, where I've been trying to honor and hold each parts of myself, their voices, feelings and their stories. I've grieved the person I wish she had been and I've grappled with who she might actually have been.

I've let each and every one of my emotions and thoughts have their full and rightful place in the realm of my heart and soul. I haven't tried to make one right and one wrong. Because I simply couldn't. They all felt entirely true.
I've tried to maintain peace between those seemingly opposite territories. I've tried to feel vast enough, to stretch my heart wide enough so they all had the room they needed. So they knew they didn't have to destroy one another to be able to exist. And somehow the acceptance of those tensions, the co-existance of pain and love, is what has felt like true peace.