What the river taught me about complexity and a Woman’s capacity to hold life.
Hi, I’m Natalie — and rivers are the throughline of my life.
I’ve floated down at least one river every year since I was in my mother’s womb. Long before I had language for systems or complexity, rivers were teaching me how life actually works.
I became a doctor of fluvial geomorphology — a geologist who studies rivers — focusing my research on driftwood and river structure. Even years after stepping away from a formal academic career, that work continues to circulate: I’m still asked to review for the National Science Foundation, my research remains widely cited, and I’m invited into conversations about rivers at a global scale.
Alongside that work, I spent decades as a professional whitewater kayaker, navigating some of the most demanding Class V rivers in the world. Many of my strongest competition results came after I had two children — not because I was pushing harder, but because years of river experience had taught me how to read complexity, commit fully, and move with precision inside uncertainty.
Most importantly, I’m a mother and a wife, putting down roots and making a home next to a river. That rootedness is where this work becomes real for me, architecting living systems, building a place-based micro-economy through my community-centered work, and actively shaping the culture of the small town where I live.
I share this about myself to name the vantage point I’m standing on. Everything I know about complexity, capacity, and resilience has been taught to me, slowly and often uncomfortably, by rivers.
In this piece I wat to illustrate what the river has taught me about a woman’s capacity to build and hold life for the long haul.
Chapter 1: Rivers are meant to be complex
My academic career focused on driftwood in rivers. At first I poo-pood the topic as inconsequential until I experienced driftwood in wild, untamed basins.
And what I learned is that: River + Complexity = Life. And the structure that makes this possible is wood.
Without wood, our rivers function at reduced capacity and the life they support suffers.
Notice the two images of the deltas below. On the left is the healthy Slave River delta (which I know intimately) with vibrant connective tissues. On the right is the disconnected, shriveled Mississippi delta
It is eerie and disturbing how closely these resemble healthy and sick livers.
Globally we are suffering from river liver disease. Our tamed rivers are disconnected, sick and struggle to support life because they have lost the structures that support their complexity and their capacity.
Chapter 2: Rivers connect us.
For years I disregarded my kayaking and adventure travel as a valuable pursuit, but in retrospect it has been the throughline and the connective tissue of my life -- bringing depth, wisdom and aliveness to all my other pursuits.
In one of my talks, Merging Science and Sport, I threw away one of the basic teachings of my culture … that I needed to discover passion and through that pursue a meaningful life.
Instead, I embraced the idea that meaning is found only after you travel the path, not before.
All I needed to do was to follow my interests, connect my communities and from that meaningful results flow.
And that turned out to be true
Chapter 3: Womanhood
But the hard truth was that as I pursued my interests , I found that structure of our culture couldn’t hold me in all my facets and interests while also nurturing me as a woman who gives and nurtures life.
Career paths, how we value time, relationships… all seemed in competition to rather than in service of motherhood and community.
In fact, the fabric of society around me looked a helluva lot like that Mississippi delta, disconnected, shrivelled, dying.
I am now an entrepreneur, and with my community center, The Missing Corner, I am building a micro-economy, changing how we relate to money and worth.
My business is adding structural elements to my community that create eddies to help us slow down and reconnect, bringing life back. just like wood in rivers.
It is really quite simple. River + Complexity = Life and Women + Complexity =Life
It’s time for women to step up as the natural stewards and architects of the cultures in which we live and craft ecosystems where we thrive in our creativity and have the spaciousness to relax and flourish as a human while tending to the lives around us.
From that place, I believe any problem can be solved.
I leave you today with these seeds of thought.
You don’t need to discover your purpose, your passion, or pursue meaningful work, instead-
Follow your interests (your heart)
Connect your communities
Build the structures around you to support and nourish your complex life
From that-, meaning, passion and purpose will naturally arise. … And the world will heal.
Thank you.
