You Have to Make Allowences for Water
You Have to Make Allowences for Water
Regardless of the events yet to happen, regardless of how much worse it gets before it gets better, we have to continue to flow.
Sweat drips steadily down my face as I do what I always do when I come here: take the dogs and head straight for the river. I stare between the upright triangular ears of my boston terrier and the floppy but alert ears of my boxer as they lead me through the field like a mis-matched dog-sled team. The boxer is strolling and the boston is trotting and thus they match speed despite their vastly different leg lengths. They pause to sniff a particular clump of grass and I try in vain to keep the sweat out of my eyes. I don’t remember it ever being this humid in the mountains even in July.
Across the field, the river is still there. Called Tahkeeostee among other names by the Cherokee, meaning “racing waters,” and Agikwa meaning “long canoe tow” by the Yuchi, the colonial settlers unimaginatively named it the French Broad because it was a wide river that ran through lands claimed by the French. The section I walk to is narrower, deep, swift, and silent. Here it doesn’t trip laughingly over rocks like it does in its wider shallower sections. It just pours by continuously, doing its thing whether I’m there or not.
You always have to make allowances for water.
The field I’m standing in is only allowed to be untouched acres in the midst of development because when the river floods, this is one of the places it goes. I’ve seen it standing full of water like a shallow lake, reflecting the stems of the trees. No matter how big or small, you can’t ignore a stream. It will continue to flow somewhere. The water has to go somewhere.
I close my eyes and picture the civilization in ruins and the river still running.
I went for one of my usual hikes last Friday, up a couple of mountains. Up the first one, stopped for the view at the top, then down so I could go around a loop and get the second mountain. I was over halfway through the loop when I realized I’d been moving through the forest without acknowledging it. I stopped and put my hands on an oak that was probably around fifty or sixty years old. “Hi,” I murmured, “I’m sorry I didn’t stop to say hello sooner.” I felt the forest collectively chuckle at me, at the humans who come to run around beneath the canopy solely for the purpose of exercise. We don’t come for the nuts or for the berries, we come for the miles, for the pictures, for the stories. But we often don’t sit and actually commune with the forest. We have places to be, money to earn, stuff to buy. We can’t sit still and just be because we can’t afford it.
The cost of living is too high.
The obscenity of that phrase grates on me especially after sitting with Becky Chambers transcendent book A Psalm for the Wild-Built. It is a depiction of a post-apocalyptic human society. Their apocalypse was when their robots became sentient and left them, prompting people to realize they couldn’t keep going the way they were and so they changed their society to a more sustainable one, one without currency, one where people didn’t need money to get what they needed to sustain life.
I came away from the book wishing I lived there and not here. It’s hard to be on this side of a multi-generational transition. To be sitting at a point in time where it is quite likely to get worse before it gets better. To wonder if things will be worse for my kids and the next generation.
And yet I look at the river and I see that no matter what people do, the water will always go somewhere. It might take hundreds or thousands or even millions of years, but water is the hand that shaped these mountains, carved these gorges, flooded these flatlands over and over creating fertile soil for things to grow.
A few months ago on a cave tour, we watched the water flowing down the walls and dripping off the ceiling of the cave forming amazing sculptures and stalactites and stalagmites. Each drop and tiny rivulet depositing another tiny amount of minerals to add to this artwork of the millenia. Water is always going to do what water does: it’s going to flow. And if you build a dam and stop it up, it will build a brand new water feature, and still require an outlet for the original stream or river.
Regardless of the events yet to happen, regardless of how much worse it gets before it gets better, we just have to continue to flow. To rest and just be, because in late-stage capitalism, rest itself is resistance to the continued attempts to turn most of us into widgets in the system to produce more wealth for the already wealthy. To declare that we are enough just by existing. Not because of what we produce, or create, or earn. We are intrinsically enough just as a tree is enough and the forest is enough, and the river is enough. And we can contribute to the building of the new world just by flowing. Our lives will leave traces and together, we can point the next generation to a new world by modeling what we want to see in our lives and communities now. And as we join our lives together, we will change the landscape of the new world.
You may have noticed I added “CJN” after my name on this publication. It’s common for members of religious orders to have a designation after their names to indicate which order they belong to. CJN is for the Companions of Julian of Norwich. Read more about it below:
“I wish I could still believe in God, but I can’t be a Christian anymore because of ______” Fill-in-the-blank with racism, misogyny, homophobia, toxic capitalism, and so on. I’ve had this conversation with different people almost word-for-word over and over. White American Christianity has so defined God that many people cannot separate God from the toxic theology they were taught.
But this isn’t the God I see in the Bible. The Bible shows us a God meeting people where they are and nudging them towards justice and total thriving for all: shalom. The Bible details arcs of justice and societal reform. If we understand how radical those arcs were in the context of the day, we can extend them forward into the future and figure out how to work for justice, total thriving, and societal reformation in our day.
I grew up in that first world view. Come along, and I’ll tell you the story of how I escaped, and I’ll show you a theology that I believe paints a more accurate picture: a faith for the common good where everyone thrives and no one is left out.
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Anna Elisabeth Howard writes highly caffeinated takes on shalom as a lens for everything from her front porch in Hendersonville, TN where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is a community organizer and movement chaplain with a background in youth and family ministry and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. An avid hiker and backpacker, many thoughts start somewhere in the middle of the woods, or under a waterfall. She is a regular contributer to Earth & Altar and her latest book is Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good.
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