River Searching for the Sea Part Whatever: AI-generated image and sky waterfalls

Generated by Nightcafe AI (prompt by myself, user Melodious)

"水路 detailed matte painting" Series

Like a river searching for the sea,

I know not where I am going, the path ahead's sinuosity,

but know I am where I am supposed to be.

See you at the outlet.

In a previous post or two, I've probably described how as a child I always wondered where rivers got so much water that they just kept flowing. Where do rivers get so much water?

Someone said it came from the mountains, and I imagined mountains high up near the clouds, with some equivalent of a river or waterfall pouring out from the clouds down the mountain. This AI-generated image with the prompt 水路 meaning "waterway" in Chinese (with an artistic modifier selected) is the closest thing to depicting what my little brain could come up with.

As I grew older I continued to collect answers like "from the mountains", "from the rain". The water cycle as a whole made perfect sense, but exactly how such long, moving channels, some of them very wide too, could be constantly replenished with so much water was not something I knew how to envision. After all, the water just keeps flowing forward with its previous space being replenished, not like a lake that could act as an enormous bowl catching water or rain barrel.

What I didn't understand at that time was watersheds, and that the bowl is much bigger.

(For more information on watersheds, see my naturenimbus.blogspot.ca post about it.)

As I learned more about hydrology and quantifying runoff, this concept became much clearer . 

Rivers are replenished by tiny drops of rain and other precipitation. It seems impossible, but they are. Rivers collect runoff, rainwater that has flowed across such a large area of the watershed, funneled into water channels. They start with tiny streaks, and they combine into creeks, and creeks into rivers.

Answered prayers work this way, too. Sometimes we wait and we pray and we watch for something like a waterfall from the heavens. Because life is so hard, we may wonder could we be replenished by anything less than a miracle?

Sometimes the answer is big like a flood, other times it is countless little things like rain scattered across a wide area, but in this way God hears us and answers our prayers, and can give you the strength to keep enduring.