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Follow the Waters
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Weeks 1 and 2 - Spending River time
The first two weeks will be devoted to connecting with local river, understanding rivers beyond surface water (atmospheric and underground), and familiarizing ourselves with basic aspects of the water cycle.
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Week 3 and 4- Walking with River
These sessions are designed to help you understand how to engage the river in learning processes and pedagogies, and how to build community around water, including issues like water rights, water justice, indigenous water guardianship and more.
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Week 5 and 6 – How to Get the River to Walk
The final two weeks will be devoted to river restoration and governance and the importance of slowing down the flow of rivers for water conservancy.
"Like school, every river has a catchment"
Lee shows us the 'awakened snake' during river school at the Cuckmere, East Sussex
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Thank you for visiting Guardians Worldwide.
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This course costs £150 ( €175/$190) .
That fee goes toward keeping our organisation going. After booking, you will get an e-booklet with all the course materials. This includes a PFD with all the course readings, external links to complimentary sources + video links to all taught sessions, so you can watch in your own time.
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10 ways of spending time with your river
Time together: How many beings beyond the strictly human can be found on your river? All beings that live in, and with the river, are riverine community members: insects, fish, birds, amphibians, invertebrates, trees, fungi, moss, lichen, bivalves, algae, humans. How do these organisms live with one another? What brings us all together? How do we interact? How do build a sense of community and interaction in a symbiotic web of river life?
Journey time: Rivers are journeys. The journey of world rivers goes beyond borders.The journey includes atmospheric rivers, underground rivers, ocean rivers-- the whole cycle-- not just what you see flowing on the surface of the land. Rivers do not belong to territories, to countries, to counties or regions. They are passing through. Basin and catchment approaches are not enough-- they do not encompass the whole, round journey. ​ Story time: There are many stories, myths and legends to be told about a river, her tributaries, her catchment, her springs. Rivers have biographies and lifecycles, they have myths of origin and creation. They are born, they grow into childish brooks, they mature and ultimately meet the sea. How many stories, myths and legends will be told over the course of a single river? Memory: The land remembers herself-- storing and storying its layers of earthly past. Can you see where the river used to flow? How has the course changed, how has the land moved, how have trees, fungi, lichen and moss stored water, how has water remembered where and how to flow? How important is it to respect and remember that natural history? What do old people remember, what do young people remember, when they come to the river? ​
Spending river time at the Chari, in Lake Chad, Republic of Chad, with Kanembu people
Voices: We encourage you to hear the voice of river: the babbling, bubbling, gurgling, splashing of many drops flowing together. Each drop is a voice and the river is a huge collection, or choir, of voices. Many rivers say the word 'rain' if you listen closely. What other words can you hear? Is there a poem to be written in the river's own words? ​ Spirit time: There are imaginary beings living in the water. Nereids, sprites, fairies and mermaids. River gods and goddesses. Caddisflies that change shape and hungry diving beetles that plunge deep, and vanish. Where do they go? These characters tell us many things about the imagination of rivers, how rivers flow from land to body, from body to mind, from waking to dreaming, like a magical water theatre that has been forgotten, and which we can learn to personify and act out once again. Music: if the muses live on water, it must be because rivers are the sources of music. Water music in India, water music in Vanuatu, river songs on the Bayou-- we are keen to go to school playing the medium river knows best- song.
Dreamtime: Can we sleep, can we dream river? Can we imagine river reveries and daydreams? As many indigenous people say, we must dream off. To "dream off" means to lead a life of goodness guided by a starting point, which is our revealed dream. Dreaming off requires water, as water changes the patterns of sleep, and the patterns of sleep change the concourse of dreams. ​ Indigenous wisdom: River wisdoms have been travelling for a long time to get to where we are. Western society sometimes lacks respect, reciprocity and acknowledgement. We see river as thing: something to be utilised, managed, controlled, taught over, explained and mostly dumped into. But where do these knowledges come from, how far into the past can your knowledge reach? Can you access an ancestral understanding of your river? And most important of all, spending time with family- parents and children...with those we love. River is kin.
