water o my water::

re/currents, re/flooding, be/wilderment

I went to an all girls summer camp in Maine
starting when I was nine years old.

Though not in touch on a regular basis with many of the girls I went with, I count them as sisters. That’s what happens when you grow alongside a person, summer after summer, in an isolated place. When I do connect with a girl from camp, no matter how long it’s been, we are immaculately children again, singing our way down a dew-covered hill. Scent of pine and dirt. Taste of lake water. Echo of a loon. It’s all right there.

One girl I have not spoken to in ages was in my dream last night. She was on a balcony, dancing. I was waving from down below, floating on some soft canoe with my husband. I was calling out to her.

A river runs through my dreamscape frequently.

I do not have recurring dreams in the sense that the movie of the dream plays over night after night, but I do have recurrent landscapes. Always have. And a main topography for my sleeping world is water. Meaning a body of water carries the dream onward. As though water itself is time. The current being the content of the dream as much as—even more so than— whatever is unfolding “plotwise.”

“As we all know, a dream hesitates, it doesn’t grasp, it stands back, it jokes, it makes itself scared, it circles, and it fizzles.” —Fanny Howe

The water carries my astral body forward, downward, onward. The water rushes pulls sweeps turns me. I am mineral; but a molecule being carried. I am nothing compared to the magnitude of the water. I am sediment, an infinitesimal being. I am rock I am barely a being, barely enough of an anything to have something like a dream moving through me, instead I am the thing being rushed by the river, a twig, a leaf, a pebble being flushed; I am litter; I am that being hushed & dreamt
by the water.

Sometimes these dreams are gentle & filled with a delicate calmness. Sometimes, like the one last night, they feature a lazy floating down something like the french riviera, entangled with my husband, sipping a drink, waving to an old friend who is partying up on a balcony & sometimes I wake aching to go back to that exact swatch of water, to that particular bend of river.

And sometimes these water dreams are entirely neutral. A pond lapping at my porch. A midnight streamwalk through a glowy cave. A wading in. Awaiting for
a kind of cleansing.

At other times, these waterlogged dreams are apocalyptic nightmares. Ones where the water takes me into its vicious current, where it swallows with terrifying force everything in its path, where giant whale-like creatures grow violent, where children’s heads bob helplessly out of reach. Where the undertide is so strong & there is no control over limbs, and there is no chance & no choice & no shore to be seen.

And from these
I wake and when I wake
I am mercifully returned to whoever I think I am.
But each time, like every river, I am changed. Rearranged.
Unable to be exactly what I was yesterday.

I don’t have a name for these types of dreams; I’ve hardly tried to articulate this inner phenomenon. It’s too strange to explain. One of those things looming just beyond language. But there is always a specific muteness I am left with. A kind of recognition in the pit of my stomach of the sensation of having been pulled, carried, finally
swept up / out of /

“Language, as we have it, fails to deal with confusion.” —Fanny Howe

into / the sensation of an aftermath. The aftermath of a surrender.
Of my I having been taken. Taken somewhere,
& spit back out into the morning

.

/ & it’s a surrendering to an aftermath that has of course been before.
To that which took place in the beginning: our being taken.
Our I’s have been taken before: before our eyes all that we knew
taken in flood. It’s flood that happened
Before anything else.
Before everything

“The awareness of both continuum and rupture occurring together may form the very rhythm of consciousness.” —Fanny Howe

There is so much to be outraged and worried about. There is so much new shit to grieve, every hour of every new day. Tactfully sieving what we let in & what we keep out & what we let carry us away is an art form, a yogic practice of the highest degree. A form of dissociation and also survival.

But this catastrophe out of Texas has knocked out my windows, drowned my being with despair. Like any former camper or counselor turned mother, who thinks of camp as a magical almost mythical place, who wore the same blue shorts and white shirts as these girls I am seeing on my screens, who sung, somehow, shockingly similar songs to those I am hearing; I am unable to rip my attention away from the flood.

Despite the difference in faith (I did not attend a Christian camp) & geography (our water was a lake not a river), despite all the fall out of ricocheting blame and hollowed political implication; despite and in light of all the other unimaginable horror going on in the world, both here and overseas, seemingly in every corner of every country, in every possible dimension:::::: I am heartbroken.

Wracked with grief again.

I am doing the math in my head. I am hearing the echoes of recent catastrophes: floods and fires, global pandemics, endless war. Widespread lies and fueling divides. Deportations and radicalizations. I am unable to ignore the chorus of ancestral echoes that whisper: your fear is valid, but let it go. Give it to the water. I don’t know what I am trying to write about here—fear or faith? apocalyptic remembrance?—and yet, I dream of it clearly. I meditate by it. I hear & write poems of it. This memory, this pattern, this choreography of water. I dwell on it. I am ever in reverence toward it. I feel it’s turning. I fear it’s recurrence. I know we have no choice but to surrender to its current.

---

2 poems to share:::

Water Song is a poem I more or less channeled (water pun!) and besides being read once aloud at Naropa last October, it has remained mine alone, unshared, unpublished, but plays over & over in my head. I don’t know what it means or where it came from or who it’s for but it felt aligned with this watery dispatch~

[Flood] is taken from my poetry collection [a go], available via Ornithopter Press ~

Thank you & rest in peace, Fanny Howe. Your words are (clearly) a recurrent inspiration to me, your mind ever a beacon to many of us.

And thank you to all who are reading this: for receiving whatever, however, wherever this newsletter goes awandering.

Also::: check out our collaborative project::: The Mothers Grimm. Fresh buck moon glimpses out today.

Whole lotta love,

G