No Ruler

What does it mean when people search for the source?

Do they need to discover the beginning? Is it a seed for further exploration? Is it an informant? Is it someone who initiates something? Is it the place we can find the validity of information?

According to the dictionary the use of the word dates back to 1346.¹

A recent book looks at early explorers who sought to find the terminus of the Nile River. Brave men, foolish men--romanticists, money hungry men, curiosity seekers, all needing to know the beginning and the end. The Nile kept itself under wraps, thwarting those who attempted to navigate the entire length until 2004 when two Americans made the complete descent from its "source as the Blue Nile in Ethiopia to the shores of Alexandria-- where it spills into the Mediterranean Sea.

Pasquale Scaturro and Gordan Brown reached the mouth of the Nile on April 28, 2004, 114 days after launching their epic 3,250 mile journey."²

Usually instead of finding the end we attempt to find the beginning, the source. How did the earth begin? Am I a person of faith who believes that God set the entire cosmos in motion? And if there was nothing before, what then is nothing?

My friend Barbara became infatuated with the Mississippi River when she first came into contact with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. We sat in the lobby of our apartment building pretending that the stairway up four flights of stairs and then to the roof was the Mississippi River. Using a ruler as a paddle we navigated our way up the stairs. Mrs. Weinstein in apartment 3B, ever vigilant for possible invaders from other planets, intercepted us, interrogated us and when satisfied that we were not threatening allowed us to proceed.

When my mother found some tar on my shoes she put an end to the river trip. Barbara, smitten with the stories of river travel, told me that someday she'd travel the entire river.

We had our East River and Hudson River, but they paled compared to the stories and history tacked on to the Mississippi.

Many years later I received a postcard from Lake Itaska, Minnesota:

Finally made it to the source of the Mississippi. No Mrs. Weinstein

¹ Old French sourse " a rising, beginning, fountainhead of a river or stream, " fem. noun taken from pp. of sourdre " to rise, spring up" from Latin " to rise" ( see surge). Wordbook Dictionary

²http://www.nilefilm.com/p_sourceToSea.htm