Fluvial sediment processes Wikipedia
Fluvial Systems Michael E Ritter at LibreTexts
The Question as posed:
What are some ways in which you feel like you may have unfolded in some respect or surprised yourself.
Or a time or place or circumstance, movie, book etc. that helped you to unfold.
Interpret unfold any way you like.
My first reaction was a carping and over-literal reading of the verse, which I soon transcended as the Question itself morphed into another delightful surprise of its own unfolding. The initial harummpf about Rivers is worth recording as a reminder of the pitfalls of literality:
The geographer in me protests that a river is a branching structure, a tree of tributaries that gathers water following the descending elevations of the topography that defines its basin. The flow, as it is seen at any point along the river's banks, is the product, the outcome, of a spread of upstream events. The surprise is a consequence of what happens in the headwaters.It's not that these hydrologic facts invalidate the poetic expression of 'unfolding', but the observed flow is gathered from so many conjoining rivulets and streams: from such a fan of antecedent conditions and events that unfold across time and space, and those are the vital dynamics that combine to produce flow.O'Donohue's poem takes flow as an Object of Contemplation, and the real nub (as Brian points out so clearly) is unfolding.
So I wonder to myself what OTHER Objects of Contemplation might illuminate the magic, the surprise of unfolding. Often the first thing that occurs to me is an image from the visual memory banks. This time the image was of a newly-emerged butterfly, unfolding its wings and preparing to fly...
...which fits right in with this beginning-of-September season, when caterpillars abound. As I search for roadside cigarette butts and other bits of detritus, I cross paths with many different species of hairy wrigglers, flowing along pathways only they understand. Where are they going? What are they doing, besides telling us what to expect of the coming winter's character [a folklore fiction, widely believed]....and the answer is that they are on their way to a future transformation into the wingéd form of butterflies and moths. The furry larvae will pupate and later emerge and unfold the wings that will carry them into the next year's generation of egg-layers and pollen-spreaders. In between they (and all other holometabolous insects —bees, flies, beetles, ants...) pass through a stage of 'goo-ification' in which they "undergo complete metamorphosis [via] a 'liquifaction phase'..." (see a page on wooly bears and pupation)
Metamorphosis is what Brian's framing of the Question with "the surprise of its own unfolding" seems to point towards, and I might go off in search of instances and examples of my own changes of Form [reminding ourselves that 'meta' is 'after' or 'beyond', and often has the odor of 'more comprehensive' or 'transcending'].
And here we go again, exploring the memory banks, searching across the tributaries, the headwaters of the present riverside view... putting together bits of this and that to surprise myself with ... what? insights? connections? scraps of wonder and delight? more rabbit holes?
"the surprise of its own unfolding" makes a pretty good summary description of career change, as the Simmons years that now seem long ago (33+ years) transformed my life... and could be usefully applied to the 19 years since I Retired and set up to please myself, and I continue to be surprised at where the flow carries me. I could also follow the unfolding in my life of photography, or of the music I'm engaged with, both to the gunwales with surprises, some of them full-on epiphanies.
One could consider surprise as the pivot point of the Question. That thought produced a short digression into Joyce Cary's wartime trilogy Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse's Mouth (1944). The lattermost was realized as one of my most favourite of movies, with Alec Guinness...
...but I then went on to think that perhaps I'm not 'surprised' very often. 'Intrigued', yes —happens all the time, a facet of the Curiosity that is a personal prime mover and animator. Gobsmacked occasionally (Merriam-Webster: overwhelmed with wonder, surprise, or shock : astounded; OED: Chiefly predicative. Flabbergasted, astounded; speechless or incoherent with amazement).
To illustrate how far afield contemplation may take one, this morning's 4AM hypnopompia found me pondering the sentience of water implied in the surprise of its own unfolding: is it the water that is 'surprised' in the poetic image's personification of the flow of a river? Does this imply a hydrosphere (atmosphere? lithosphere?) that is itself alive? The very ESSENCE of the biosphere is the LIFE that teems within it, which occupies the hydrosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere... and LIVES by transduction of [extraterrestrial] solar radiation and the formation of trophic webs that move the incoming energy among life forms. Somewhere in that complexity of exchange and interlinkage sentience —the consciousness of existence— arises (and arose, at some point). But before that, Genesis says the world was "without form, and void" and "God moved upon the waters..."
I don't question the sentience of the anadromous fish who return to the rivers they were spawned in —they sense something about the water of those streams, but H2O is H2O, though uniquely flavored with minerals and chemicals dissolved and bits of organic matter suspended and carried downstream, to be sensed by the upstream-bound fish.
It seems that there are river gods all over the globe (Potamoi in Greek mythology, Hapi in the Nile, Enki/Ea in Mesopotamia, various personifications in India...)
Thinking about river basins as physical entities and "fundamental geomorphic units" (a perspective I first adopted in Sarawak, where rivers explain 'most everything), I hunted up the Hydrology books in the library and reacquainted myself with fluvial processes, which
sculpt the landscape, eroding landforms, transporting sediment, and depositing it to create new landforms... (National Park Service)
Fluvial sediment processes Wikipedia
Fluvial Systems Michael E Ritter at LibreTexts
fluvial Objects of Contemplation
Two renderings of the surprise of a river's unfolding:
sediment in the Shubenacadie River in Nova Scotia:
Unfolding the Hinges of Reality to reveal previously obscured Beings
has been a staple of my photographic enterprises for the last decade:
hmmmm... what would happen if I cropped thus and
copy-flip-join ...hey presto!
I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to the obvious point that O'Donohue's river-flow is a Metaphor (a Simile, actually... 'like a river flows'). Of course the flowing river doesn't have to be a literal water-river in a geographical landscape, and ANYTHING can be "its own unfolding".
I recognize that I've often had that feeling of SURPRISE from *books*, from *images*, from *musical passages*, when SOMETHING from within reaches out to ...warm the soul in the light of Recognition of the sublime. There must be a term for that kind of flash of consciousness. Maybe satori: 'intuitive illumination', 'awakening, comprehension, understanding'. And grok covers some of the same experiential territory. One can't will it, or make it happen, but you KNOW when it does. "The surprise of its own unfolding" is ...le mot juste, right?
A while ago I made a Gallery of Photographic Inspiration, which now seems to encapsulate and distill what might best be expressed as a bumper sticker:
a fan, a river:
surprised by its unfolding,
satori happens