Holding the Mississippi River in place and other implications for qualitative research

Holding back a river is used here as a metaphor and five suggested "tributaries" are suggested with the purpose of acknowledging the situated context that qualitative nurse researchers may wish to journey upon. Our nursing knowledge base must include the human experience. We need to become oriented to a world of meaning. Meaning will enlighten and give direction to our nursing practice. The unexamined taken-for-granted approach misses the essential structures of being. Those essential structures of being are what might actualize the possibilities of new ideas, new directions, new designs, new life, birth.