Last month my husband and I went camping in the Maitai valley near Nelson. For seven days we lived mainly outside. Most days the sun glowed through leaves just beginning to turn golden. We heard bell-birds by day and ruru by night. And always, the sound of the Maitai river, quiet and steady and strong.

It took me back to camping as a child, in the Rungeet valley between Sikkim and India. The hills were higher and the river swifter, but the same sound, as I lay in the tent while the grown-ups played card games by lantern-light, sent me peacefully to sleep.

Returning to life in Wellington was returning to the news cycle: to horrible images of murder and famine, to what seemed like lunatic pronouncements from politicians. It was being reminded that people in our city are hungrier now, and more of them are homeless. It was being disappointed again by decisions that seem to undo years of learning and practising to bring greater equity and wellbeing to all of us.

Today I listened to a friend talking about the heaviness that’s weighing him down – ‘oh, for about a year at least,’ he said. It’s not his own life circumstances but the world’s grief that sucks at his spirit. War and famine overseas, division and despair in our own communities, and our actions and prayers that make no discernible difference.

One day I took a dip in the Maitai river. The water was cold and smelt a little bit weedy, and the current lifted me and carried me gently from the swimming hole back to the shallows. For a moment I was immersed in the sound of the river.

I already knew I wanted to write about the river, and then, today’s scripture readings turned up*. The prophet Ezekiel, in exile in Babylon, saw a river flowing from the temple in Jerusalem, a river that deepened and flowed until the salty dead sea turned fresh and “where the river flows everything will live”. (Ezekiel 47:10) Trees grow on both banks, their fruit good for food and their leaves for healing; and the fish are abundant.

Jerusalem and Babylon and all the places in between and around them are in the news, (by different names) almost daily. The contrast with Ezekiel’s vision of life overflowing is almost unbearable.

In my city, Wellington, most of the rivers flow underground. Waimāpihi, Kaiwharawhara, Kumutoto, Waitangi and the others still run in culverts and drains, still harbour eels and fish, still find the sea. Near the Cenotaph, down by Parliament, there’s a pavement where, if you pause and listen carefully, you can hear the sound of the stream below, steadily finding its way down to Te Whanganui-a-Tara. But most people walk on, hearing only the traffic, or the busy jabber of information from their devices.

Jesus promised that any thirsty person who comes to him will experience living waters perpetually bubbling up from their heart. I am so thirsty for that river of life. How can I listen to its song, calm myself in its depth, be carried by its current? I find myself singing under my breath ‘when I go down to the river to pray, studying along that good old way ... oh sinners let’s go down, down to the river to pray.’

“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall.” (Psalm 46, the other reading of the day). Perhaps that is what the river is singing. ‘God is within her, she will not fall.’

In these noisy, frightening days, I am trying to listen to the river that keeps flowing.