Before America had highways, it had rivers. Before it had parties, it had paddlers.
When the Founders placed the words E Pluribus Unum upon the nation’s seal, they were not simply designing a motto. They were naming a truth they’d seen in the natural world around them: that many streams, when joined, form a single, powerful current. It was not a call for sameness but for strength in diversity. For unity born from motion.
Today, our country feels like a river splitting around a snag where half the people flow going one way, and no surprise the other half go the other way. That old visual still matters. The question is not whether the water will divide. It always does. The question is whether we can stay in the same current, together, long enough to find the way downstream.
I’ve spent much of my life in rivers, in canoes, kayaks, bay and inlet waters, and sailboats that run through and around the green arteries of Florida and beyond. The lessons those waters offer about people are ancient and enduring. When I ask, “How do you stay in the same current when the water divides?”, three answers rise up like buoys from experience.
- 🌊 Keep paddling toward common ground
- 🧭 Pause, listen, and find the deeper channel
- ⚓ Trust the crew, not the current
🌊 Keep paddling toward common ground
When a river forks, the first instinct is to pick a side. Left or right. Fast or slow. Shallow or deep. But a paddler learns that the water itself doesn’t care for sides; it seeks the path of least resistance, the way that leads forward.
The same is true for a nation. We’ve grown used to dividing the stream,left versus right, rural versus urban, old versus young. But the river of America was never meant to flow in fragments. Our strength comes not from uniformity, but from a shared direction.
On expedition, when two paddlers argue over which channel to take, progress stops. I’ve seen it in mangrove mazes where the tide pulls both ways. You don’t solve it by shouting louder. You keep paddling toward where the water sounds alive where the tide speaks in one voice. Sometimes that means letting go of pride to find the smoother run.
Our ancestors knew this. Indigenous paddlers of the Pacific Northwest carved great cedar canoes wide enough for ten, balanced for both speed and ceremony. In Florida, the Seminole poled dugouts through the flooded cypress, their routes shifting with every storm. These weren’t people who built bridges by decree; they read the water and learned its language.
Keeping America in the same current begins with motion. It’s the honest effort in the same direction. Paddle together toward the middle, and you’ll find the common ground beneath the flow.
🧭 Pause, listen, and find the deeper channel
Every paddler learns to read the surface. Ripples mean rocks. Smooth glass often hides depth. But sometimes the current fools you, the noisy channel is not the true one. The quiet water, dark and steady, is where the real power moves.
The same applies to our public life. The loudest opinions are often the shallowest. The deeper current is made of listening, patience, and the willingness to drift for a moment before deciding where to dig in your paddle.
I’ve had days on the Suwannee River where the surface current ran upstream in a gusting wind. If I’d fought it with brute force, I’d have exhausted myself in an hour. Instead, I learned to pause, rest the blade, and watch how the leaves floated. Beneath that confusion, the true current still flowed downstream steady and unseen.
In times like ours, it’s tempting to react to every eddy and gust. Unity requires a slower art: listening for the depth below the noise. Anthropology teaches that cultures thrive when they find shared stories and myths that connect the practical with the spiritual. For Americans, that myth has always been the river: a journey together through uncertainty, guided by trust and adaptation.
When you pause long enough to see the full stream, you notice something humbling it’s not just your reflection on the surface. It’s everyone’s.
⚓ Trust the crew, not the current
Even the best paddler is nothing without a crew. On a long expedition, you learn to depend on the rhythm of others the bow’s steady stroke, the stern’s quiet corrections, the laughter that breaks tension in a storm. You can’t control the river, but you can trust those in your boat.
America is that boat. We’re lashed together by design and by destiny, and though the water changes, the crew remains. When we forget to trust one another, the current takes us where it pleases often into driftwood and whirlpools of resentment.
I’ve led crews after hurricanes and swamp crossings where everything familiar vanished. The ones who thrived were not the strongest or loudest, but the ones who trusted the team. They believed that a hand on the shoulder meant more than an argument shouted over the wind.
In the same way, the Republic doesn’t survive on unanimity. It survives on trust the belief that even if we paddle differently, we’re heading toward the same bend in the river.
Trust the crew, not the current. The current shifts, storms rise, and the water divides. But a crew bound by purpose will always find the channel again.
The river as Republic
If you study the Great Seal, you’ll see that E Pluribus Unum arches above a bald eagle clutching arrows and olive branches. The bird doesn’t fly because of either weapon or peace offering it flies because both wings move together. Our nation’s balance has always required both sides of the stroke.
The river is the same. It flows because left and right banks shape it together. Without those banks, the current would spill out and lose its force. That is the paradox of unity: it requires difference, but it depends on mutual respect.
As paddlers, we know this in our bones. Every trip is a microcosm of democracy shared labor, shared risk, and shared joy. Around the campfire after a long day’s paddle, differences dissolve in the glow of food and story. The stew pot becomes a parliament, and the flame its gavel. Everyone gets a spoon.
This is the heart of The Seal and the Stream: to remember that unity is not agreement. It’s alignment. It’s the collective promise to keep moving, even when the water splits and the sky goes gray.
Field Wisdom
“A river’s wisdom is in its persistence. It bends, it yields, but it never forgets where it’s going.”
So how do we stay in the same current when the water divides?
We keep paddling toward common ground.
We pause, listen, and find the deeper channel.
And we trust the crew, not the current.
Because the truth is older than the flag and stronger than any storm:
Out of many, one river.
Out of many, one people.
E Pluribus Unum.
#EPluribusUnum #LiquidRhythmKayaking #AmericanRivers #UnityInMotion #FirestandFeast #SeaScouts #FloridaBushcraft #OutdoorLeadership #AmericanSpirit
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