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Water is Life

“There’s water always cycling around us. Sometimes it comes in a spring’s quiet seep, sustaining life in an imperceptible flow. Sometimes it comes in a storm’s raging deluge, sweeping away the familiar to force new beginnings. For years after the storm of Daddy’s death, I thought about water. I dreamed about water. Odd, though,was the absence of water where it should have been. There was very little crying in my family when my Daddy died, although I heard Mama sobbing in her bedroom one night. I can’t remember more than a drizzling of tears from the rest of us. That was just our family; growing up, I’d mostly associated tears with physical pain.”

This passage about “water” comes from J. Drew Lanham’s powerful memoir, “The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature.” Lanham weaves a story of growing up Black in the rural South, and his love of the natural world that eventually leads him to becoming an ornithologist. The passage comes near the end of a chapter called “Life’s Spring,” devoted to his father’s tireless efforts to provide fresh water from a nearby spring, his last “dried up” days, and the ultimate theme that water is life.  Lanham is trying to find a new beginning after his father’s death, but he is unable to find a way to grieve and mourn, to move on, learn, grow.

This past year people have had to deal with so much, face so much suffering: the historical conflagration of the Covid Pandemic and the inadequate governmental response to this national and international emergency; the suffering and outrage over the killing of George Floyd and other Black people by police and the subsequent, ongoing focus on undoing systematic, structural racism; and the brutal forest fires on the West Coast, accelerated by global warming and our unwillingness to address the magnitude of the climate crisis on a social and individual level. These “general” crises affect people in different ways. Each individual, family, community struggles with different problems and has access to different resources. How can we come together and address these problems, issues, and crises as individuals, as families, as communities?

My sister and I were able to get my father into a nursing home this year in the midst of all the fear and isolation around Covid. The school where I work was able to go back to in-person instruction at the beginning of September. We are trying to figure out how to  to make our commitment to anti-racist education, represented by a large Black Lives Matter banner on the front door, real and tangible in our pedagogy and how we care for students and families. During these winter months we are working at how to continue to conduct most of our “classroom time” outdoors and deepen our collective understanding of place-based, outdoor education.

“And so I didn’t fully, deeply mourn the death of my father for almost thirty years. Through all of that time without him–college, growing up with my own family, career building, the ups and downs of life–there was no time for remembering what had been. I finally broke down when I was in my forties. An assignment from a writing-workshop instructor to compose a five-hundred word essay on “place” unlocked the floodgates. I fretted over what to write most of the evening. Late that night in a spartan dorm room, in Craftsbury Common Vermont, I began to craft a piece about my boyhood memories of family and the Home Place. I struggled at first, not sure which way the river of words would bend. But once the words began to flow I couldn’t stop them.”

I was 49 years old, it was around Christmas time, and I was beat up and discouraged. My wife of twenty-eight years had left me, exhausted from my drinking, lying and betrayals. My children were begging me to stop drinking, and though I would do anything to protect them and make them happy, I couldn’t find a way to stop. So I lied and did the best I could to pretend that I had stopped, or that I had “it” under control. My daughter, who was doing her valient best to keep the family together, hosted Christmas day with her husband. After a lovely morning of Christmas cheer, the presence of my estranged wife and children, songs, smiles, hugs and gift giving, my son-in-law and daughter were helping me bring presents to my car– and in a fit of pique my bottle of vodka decided to roll out from under the driver’s seat. They looked at me through the glass and mid-morning chill air with confusion, anger and disgust. I sped off comforted by some magical thinking that what had just happened had not happened, and all I really needed was a few more, deep swigs from my bottle.

Not long after that, my son was sleeping over with me and jumped on the bed to say good night, a familiar ritual that we had shared since he was a little kid. Horrifically, as he collapsed into my arms, he felt the old, familiar Bottle beneath my mattress. His bright, shining eyes full of despair, fear and love desperately looking for some life in mine. That night I felt broken, but little did I know I was being broken open. Suffering from what I later learned to describe as “pitiful,incomprehensible, demoralization,” I called my sister, who had been in recovery for many years, and I asked for help. While I had no idea how things would turn out, or what I needed to do, the dam of denial, numbness and despair had started to crack, and the revitalizing waters of life, hope, and curiosity about what might be possible began to seep into my being.

“The next morning I tried to read the words I had written to five women I didn’t know, in a place I’d spent hardly any time. Many of them had already let their tears flow freely over the words they had shared–about memories of love for people and places and of painful losses, too. They’d unwittingly given me permission to be someone I’d never been. As I waded through the words of what my life with Daddy had been, the dam broke. Some spring deep within me welled up. I cried, and the water that was my life cycled through me.”

I was terrified to acknowledge I was an alcoholic because I thought that would mean that I was admitting that I was a failure as a father and a human being. What I have since learned is that my vulnerability and openness to others softens my heart and opens my mind.  I can now stand in relationship with my children, my family, my friends, my students, my community and share one of the greatest lessons of all: No matter how big your problems seem to be, if you can manage to speak from your heart, feel your feelings, share your shame, grief, fear, anger and confusion, and ask for help, you can overcome them. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be open. Ask and it shall be given when the love comes tumbling down… like a cool rain refreshing the parched fields of loneliness and quiet desperation.

“I have since seemed to have crossed a bridge. It’s not uncommon for me to cry now. Sorrow and pain–losses of loved ones– bring tears out in slow ebbs. But they also come in the happiest moments. A full moon rising to make the forest glow in a cold fire, a winter sunset burnishing a bay salt marsh in every imaginable hue, or a thrush singing sweetly from within a dark wood are all just cause for letting the water flow freely.”

I have since crossed a bridge. I cry and laugh easily from the depths of my soul. Yesterday we watched a documentary called 76 Days chronicling the seventy-six days of lockdown in Wuhan China as doctors, nurses, family members struggled to care for the suffering and stop the spread of Covid-19. Birth, sickness, aging, and death, the human condition, sped up and magnified because of the horrors of the pandemic, threatened to overwhelm the humanity of all involved. But compassion, kindness, joy, courageous equanimity, and wise action, manifested in a thousand small acts of love and a steadfast determination to care for those in need, transformed the grief, pain and suffering into meaning, into an affirmation of life.

A couple of days after this Christmas I was taking care of my grandchildren and we went to explore East Rock Park and the Mill River. The Mill River that flows through Sleeping Giant, the land of Hobbomock, the legendary stone giant of the Quinnipiac people. The Mill River where Eli Whitney made his gun factory. The Mill River where my sister and I spread my mother’s ashes two and half years ago.  Making our way to the Lake Whitney waterfall, I watched with joy as Casey and Jackson delighted in the sprays of mist coming off the lake, and the sheets of water cascading into the Mill River below. When I was a child my family moved from New York City to South Britain, Connecticut. Behind our house the Pomperaug River flowed mysteriously through time and space. One day I found a place under a waterfall where I could stand, almost dry, and look out at the world through a kaleidoscope of water and light. In these moments I feel the interconnectedness of all things. I feel whole and at peace.

Tonight, as we usher in the New Year, my partner, my son and I are playing a game called Wingspan, an incredibly complicated “engine building” game where you try to populate different environments with as many different birds as possible. As we struggle with the game’s complexity,  discuss various forms of co-dependency and what the word “meta” means, I feel at home in the world. I feel connected to my son and my partner, J. Drew Lanham, and all the people and creatures with whom I share this earth.  There is plenty of space for tears and laughter,  growth and care.  The course of childhood to maturity doesn’t flow like a river. But I can luxuriate and rest in the deep waters of our lives together, and I know that my soul, our souls, have “grown deep like rivers”( Langston Hughes). Each year, each day, presents new challenges and opportunities. But believe me, you can always begin again to learn how to love the world, how to love yourself. We need to continue to learn how to let the water of our interdependent lives circulate and flow freely in mutual aid, work and play, joy and happiness. Tonight I have peace, like a river, in my soul.

Happy New Year

May all beings be happy

May all beings be healthy

May all beings be safe

May all beings find their true nature

May all beings be free from suffering

And ( as my kids at school like to say) May all beings be free to go outside