just around the river bend!

What rivers can teach you about staying the course.

Hi friends. Some of you might be new to this newsletter, and I wanted to tell you why I write about geology once a month.

I have written a concept album about geology! It’s coming later this year.

The songs are about how geological processes and features can mimic our own, very human, lives. I love thinking about this stuff and I want to share these thoughts and parallels which fly through my head. How can geology make us feel better about where we are in our lives? How can the way the world changes reflect our own changing selves?

Read on this week to find out what rivers and side quests have in common.

Dad and I were driving to Braemar, a village in the Scottish Highlands. I think I was about 13. We used to make this trip all the time when Grandma and Granddad lived there, making our way from Aberdeen into the Cairngorms National Park.

The road follows the river Dee upstream, winding its way from the North Sea back to its ice-cold origins in the mountaintops. There’s this bit with a broad stony bank, and a huge pine tree, where I always imagined a bear would be standing, looking for fish.

We have no bears in Scotland, but a girl can dream.

We were driving round this stony bend when I asked Dad, “Is this the longest corner in the world?”

“…what?”

“You know there’s a part of this road which is the longest corner in the world, which part is it?”

Dad frowned and laughed at the same time. “There’s no such thing as the longest corner in the world.”

I was confused. “But you said it! We were driving round a bend here somewhere and you said, This is the longest corner in the world!”

“How can a corner be long, Olivia!?”

“I don’t know!” My voice went high pitched. “You said it!”

We were both laughing by this point, following the river round its bend. I could have sworn that Dad had told me, years ago, that this was the longest corner in the world.

Turns out Dad had just made a sarcastic comment whilst driving, and wasn’t pointing out an established Guinness World Record. My child brain had grabbed on to it like a shiny penny, This Is The Longest Corner In The World.

I don’t know about you but sometimes I feel like I am currently riding the longest corner in the world. Not quite where I’m meant to be, and taking such a long time to get there that it almost feels like a detour.

📐 Leaning In To It

What’s around the river bend? Waiting just around the river bend?

For all the historical inaccuracies of Disney’s Pocahontas, I think I speak for most of us when I say we’ve all secretly wished we could row a canoe through technicolour forests, tiny leaves and bits of magic swirling in our luscious hairdo. I think I speak for most of us when I also say we’ve all wished for a luscious hairdo. And a raccoon.

The river bends and as we take these winding detours, we only feel hope, curiosity and excitement. And the security that we will always have a raccoon to lean on.

It’s funny, because moving to London was never on my Life Agenda. When I made the decision to come here in 2015, it felt like an odd detour. But after 8 years of living here, it doesn’t seem like a detour anymore. After my hometown where I grew up, it’s the place I’ve lived for the longest. It’s been part of my course.

When I first came here in late 2015 I had a sparkly backpack and a dream: music. Make the music, play the music. Be the musician.

I moved in with three strangers: a porridge-eating saxophone player who couldn’t play saxophone that well but by God did he put the hours in, a woman with a Thor-like boyfriend and an aggressive gym habit, and a sweet Italian girl who worked in a pasta restaurant to supplement her studies.

The flat was a tiny place just off of Old Kent Road, which, if you know your London Monopoly, is the first square on the board. I had to walk sideways to get into my bed every night.

I settled into London life, going to songwriting classes, buying double gin and tonics at the student bar, and spending half my money on speciality coffee. I had an untameable bob cut and a wardrobe that dressed me in black or sequins, or both. I played my first band gig with an ambitious (and logistically-nightmarish) 6 other musicians in a leather jacket and what was literally a nightie but I styled it out. People said I looked like Debbie Harry meets Snow White. I fell for an Austrian and went to Vienna a couple times a year, I loved the buildings but I could never love the food. I wrote songs but was always a little too scared to put myself out there and go for what I wanted.

Always in the back of my head there was something saying, “You will move on from this one day, you will get back to where you need to be.” This went on for years and I really struggled with the feeling that I was meant to be somewhere else, and all of this was a weird side quest.

Now in 2024, I am still in London. My hair is longer. I don’t play with a 7-piece band but I play solo and actually get paid for it, now. My wardrobe is no longer fully black, and if you took a look at it you’d probably profile me as ‘whimsical art teacher who lives in a gloomy climate.’ In winter there is a beret glued to my head. I love an English man and Chelmsford doesn’t have the architecture of Vienna but it’s cheaper to travel to and the local cuisine isn’t aspic and various meat pastes. Plus, he makes me laugh more. I write songs and am still a little scared to put myself out there, but I do it anyway.

London is no longer a side quest. There’s something to be said for leaning into the changes. We all want to take the most direct path to where we’re going, but even on the straightest course, there are meanders.

🌊 What Makes the River Bend?

Meandering. Probably a word that best describes what I do when I’m in a supermarket with an empty stomach. I meander around without a clue.

In geomorphology, meanders are what rivers make when they start bending a little harder into their course. A river can start out straight, going from A to B with hardly any detours. But a little bend becomes bigger and bigger with time, as the faster water cuts into the far side of the river and the slow-moving water makes deposits on the opposite side. They work together to make that river WIGGLE.

Here is a diagram:

You start with a river taking the most direct course it can, but over time it gets loopier and loopier.

the Amazon river, by NASA. SQUOOGLY!

London was a loop that I leaned into, it was a meander that I wasn’t expecting but the more time I spent here, the bigger the meander got. Bending, bending, bending.

But most rivers end up going where they mean to go. A bigger body of water. Their final destination. I know I’m gonna get there.

If you’re on a weird path right now, thinking, this is the longest corner in the world, maybe try thinking of it as a meander. Lean into it. You’ll get where you need to go.

📝 WEEKLY QUESTION FREE-FOR-ALL

1. What river did you grow up nearest to?

2. Have you ever been in a canoe?

3. What’s been the most surprising meander your life has taken? What did you love about it?

More Olivia, just around the riverbend!

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Til next time! Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶