Societal relations to rivers shape how they are managed and the outcomes and legacy effects that ensue. Asserting river rights is often conveyed as an advance beyond anthropocentric command-and-control perspectives that assert human authority over rivers in the service of society. In Aotearoa New Zealand the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 granted rights to the Whanganui River as a living and indivisible entity. However, legal framings crafted to implement rights perpetuate human control over the river. Such a lens is nonsensical to local Māori, who consider themselves ‘part of the river’ (I am the river and the river is me). Here I reflect upon ways of knowing and living with rivers in more-than-human terms, drawing parallels between Māori and Daoist ways of being. Contemplations on the design and conduct of more-than-human geomorphology draw upon approaches that ‘Let the River Speak’, highlighting relations between digital abstractions and grounded realities in an age of Big Data and machine learning applications (theoretical and idiosyncratic rivers). I consider moves towards Communities of River Practitioners (CoRPs) as a practical basis to weave, synthesize and share plural understandings of rivers, highlighting prospects that ‘stories as method’ provides a generative basis to ‘listen to rivers and learn from them’.