created 2025-02-15, & modified, =this.modified
The round river is a river of myth (and a concept), that flows into itself. It is self originating and self sustaining.
Paul Bunyan Tall Tale
One time Paul’s men started the logs down a new river which they had never seen before. They began to notice that they were seeing familiar places over and over again and then finally realized that they were on the Round River which went round and round and had no end. Paul knew that this was a bad thing so he shoveled out the center of the river and made it into a big lake which is now known as Round Lake.‘
Oceanus
The round river is also featured in the Greek myth, with Okeanos the earth-encircling river. Okeanos is sometimes considered a person, though more usually a place (which boundsthe earth.) The sun, moon and stars were believed to rise from its waters and it was the font of all earth’s fresh water, such as springs, wells and rain-clouds.
The river symbolized the flow of time.
Echo
There was a day when Narcissus was walking in the woods. Echo, a mountain nymph, saw him and fell deeply in love with him. She followed him. Narcissus sensed that someone was following him and shouted “Who’s there?“. Echo repeated “Who’s there?“. She eventually revealed her identity. She made an attempt to embrace the boy. He stepped away from her and told her to leave him alone. She was heartbroken and spent the rest of her life in lonely glens until nothing but an echo sound remained of her.
Thought
rel:River and Death If the river is seen as the flow of time and life, its passage will always lead to the inevitable death, hence the association.
Aldo Leopold’s Round River
Used it as a metaphor for Ecology.
“The current is the stream of energy which flows out of the soil into plants, thence into animals, thence back into the soil in a never ending circuit of life…
In our educational system, the biotic continuum is seldom pictured to us as a stream. From our tenderest years we are fed with facts about the soils, floras, and faunas, that comprise the channel of Round River (biology), about their origins in time (geology and evolution), about the technique of exploiting them (agriculture and engineering).
This calls for a reversal of specialization; instead of learning more and more about less and less, we must learn more and more about the whole biotic landscape”
“Ecology is an infant just learning to talk, and, like other infants, is engrossed with its own coinage of big words. Its working days lie in the future. Ecology is destined to become the lore of Round River, a belated attempt to convert our collective wisdom of biotic materials into a collective wisdom of biotic navigation. This, in the last analysis, is conservation