The Through-Line with Mark Dubois- how to navigate these troubling times

My husband introduced me to the legacy of one of his heroes, Mark Dubois, and later to Mark himself when Mark and his wife Clare moved to our town a few years ago. Mark is a catalyst of the environmental movements to keep rivers safe and free-flowing. He co-founded Friends of the River, International Rivers, and Earth Day International. My sons almost love that he chained himself to a rock in the Stanislaus River canyon in the early 1970s to protest the filling of the New Melones Dam.

He is internationally recognized and honored for his activism. Dedication, heart-centered politics, and just who he is in our world. We also love him for his one-of-a-kind hugs. Mark introduced the river runners' use of “through-line” to a wider world as he fleshed out what through-line really means in how we navigate our own lives in an increasingly complicated world. This concept, once grasped, becomes a tool and helper to develop skill and capacity to not only react to and bobble down the river of our lives, but also to make friends with it, know it and become skilled in it to fully enjoy and appreciate this precious human existence.