Saying "I talked to the river" is an easily understood statement, albeit odd depending on the context. Conversely, when one says "I listened to the river", a first meaning is aprehended: my ears receive soundwaves coming from the river. It's a highly elusive kind of sound indeed, the flow of a river. Same for waves at the coast, or the sooting backdrop ambience of a rainy night. But is that in fact listening?
The question I'm trying to ellaborate on here is: how to communicate with water? That goes beyond turning ideas into spoken words and expecting to feel something as one's brain receives aerial vibration transformed into electric signals. Communicating, after all, implies engaging in commonality. Many of us understand the feeling of being in deep contact with water bodies, beyond the 5 or 6 tamed senses our minds tend to cling to.
We male characters, often caught by surprise by sudden lessons from water. Archimedes, the bath, Eureka! Heraclitus understanding rivers and time, and more recently Hesse's Siddhartha finding truth and deciding to stay and learn more. And myself, when I felt some years ago that the stones in a waterfall in Cunha were trying to show me something - or swimming at a beach in the Arabic peninsula and feeling immediately connected to my son, then still in his mother's belly in Ubatuba.