Collaboration Flows Like Water
Preview of The Understory: Issue Twenty-One
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Issue Twenty-One is well underway but needs a bit more time to complete. It is a very special Issue as it is written in collaboration with dear friend and work collaborator Musa Nxumalo on our interrelationship with Water. When Musa and I had our first exchange months ago, it was a rich dialogue about our dependence on Water, and the regional differences between Water’s life-supporting properties in western Canada and South Africa. Musa’s perspectives are informed by growing up around Johannesburg and by spending over a decade in gold mining—one of the most water-intensive industries. My perspectives are informed by growing up along the fourth largest river in the world, the Mississippi River, and the contrast with my current home in Vancouver, British Columbia, situated within one of the world’s largest temperate rainforests.
Us-two are still co-writing Issue Twenty-One in a way that intertwines perspectives from both sides of the Atlantic and from lived experiences and cultural traditions that radically differ. It is symbolic to write about Water collaboratively. The United Nations calls Water the “climate connector” as it invites collaboration and coordination across nearly all aspects of life we consider sacred. Water is also how most of us will experience climate change most acutely. Issue Twenty-One unfolds these broad and intimate connections with Water: around us, inside us, and between us.
I would welcome your help sharing The Understory with friends, family, and colleagues in your own community in advance of Issue Twenty-One. Who are the special people in your life who are looking to deepen their connections to the complexity and abundance of this wondrous universe? By sharing The Understory with five people, you will be helping the community grow and the conversations and perspectives shared become richer. In our journey for a healthier living planet, we need to grow communities of support about our desired future and the collective and individual actions that will make it possible.
While you await Issue Twenty-One, I would like to invite you to begin contemplating the complexities of Water through the beautiful words of Irish poet, theologian and philosopher, John O’Donohue. His poem, “In Praise of Water,” is featured in Four Elements: Reflections on Nature.
Let us bless the grace of water:
The imagination of the primeval ocean
Where the first forms of life stirred
And emerged to dress the vacant earth
With warm quilts of colour.
The well whose liquid root worked
Through the long night of clay,
Thrusting ahead of itself openings
That would yet yield to its yearning
Until at last it arises in the desire of light
To discover the pure quiver of itself
Flowing crystal clear and free
Through delighted emptiness.
The courage of a river to continue belief
In the slow fall of ground,
Always falling further
Towards the unseen ocean.
The river does what words would love,
Keeping its appearance
By insisting on disappearance,
Its only life surrendered
To the event of pilgrimage,
Carrying the origin to the end,
Seldom pushing or straining,
Keeping itself to itself
Everywhere all along its flow,
At one with its sinuous mind,
An utter rhythm, never awkward,
It continues to swirl
Through all unlikeness,
With elegance:
A ceaseless traverse of presence
Soothing on each side
The stilled fields,
Sounding out its journey,
Raising up a buried music
Where the silence of time
Becomes almost audible.
Tides stirred by the eros of the moon,
Draw from the permanent restlessness,
Perfect waves that languidly rise
And pleat in gradual forms of aquamarine
To offer every last tear of delight
At the altar of stillness in-land.
And the rain in the night, driven
By the loneliness of the wind
To perforate the darkness,
As though some air-pocket might open
To release the perfume of the lost day
And salvage some memory
For its forsaken turbulence
And drop its weight of longing
Into the earth, and anchor.
Let us bless the humility of water,
Always willing to take the shape
Of whatever otherness holds it.
The buoyancy of water,
Stronger than the deadening,
Downward drag of gravity,
The innocence of water,
Flowing forth, without thought
Of what awaits it,
The refreshment of water,
Dissolving the crystals of thirst.
Water: voice of grief,
Cry of love,
In the flowing tear.
Water: vehicle and idiom
Of all the inner voyaging
That keeps us alive.
Blessed be water,
Our first mother.
Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. See you next Saturday with Issue Twenty-One.
Adam & Musa
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Why I Write The Understory
We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The scale of the issue demands not only continuous focus but also the courage to take bold action. I've found that a persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause.
The Understory is my way of organizing the natural and human-made curiosities that capture my attention. Within the words, research, and actions of others lies the inspiration for personal and organizational journeys. I hope that my work here will help to inform not just my persistent consciousness, but yours as well.
"Blessed be water,
Our first mother."
Amen!