If Water is Speaking I’m Paying Attention

What does water teach in Stories Emerge Like Bears?

At the river’s edge I once saw the dead released, smoke and fire on the Yamuna river, notes from strings of a sitar nearby, piercing and persistent, a foil to the deep cut of mortality.

There I first learned that water carries grief and is a visible symbol of grief. “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept” is contemporary, even if it was written long ago and doesn’t sound like a place in the Midwest or the Southwest.

Not Babylon, but still like the waters edge at Babylon, my father sat at Big Casey Lake near his end, listening to gentle waves formed by the west wind for the last time. I think he too was paying attention to the whispers and waves.

Water has formed my experience; the muted blue of a tiger shark in Hawaii, looking up and measuring me from below, a dip under an ice-covered Lake Independence in Michigan after sauna, the hot-springs of Montana, or a wade in the salty Bay of Bengal in India’s southeast coast.

How do Big Casey Lake and India become spiritual teachers?

India is the best teacher of relinquishment. It is a land of grieving souls that together as one surround, overwhelm, and swallow individual grief into communal grief, while still providing space for each person to cry in their own voice.

In India,

death cannot be denied.

Death is in the face

everywhere

at all times

no exceptions.

At the river’s edge I once saw the dead released, smoke and fire on the Yamuna river, notes from strings of a sitar nearby, piercing and persistent, a foil to the deep cut of mortality.

GAO

I felt relinquishment when visiting Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial tomb in New Delhi. Every visitor removed their shoes as if standing on holy ground; there were more symbols too: flame, wheel, statue, shoes and sandals. They’re a familiar site at every doorway.

The shoes are not memorials to death, they’re symbols of stepping beyond that threshold; moving beyond a past, present, or future. In some odd way, the satyagraha of sandals comforts me.

I think about these symbols and the gravity of life when I am at the cabin, my small-time Oz in the Northwoods. I pay attention best where there are no crowds or seekers or wizards, but when I am alone with those anchors of constancy at that small place.

Next year I will be different, and the year after that different again, (and you will be too), but those anchors will remain the same. The water will be there.

Why does attention matter in a lyric memoir?

Attention maters there, at the cabin, because it’s the only way to get answers. I’m weary of their pace though. I want answers, and I want them now; but water and silence and time answer in decades. Those decades are adding up now.

Early mornings at the cabin, after a night of deep quiet, my ears are sharp. The grouse drums in the woods, maybe a bobcat howls. Sometimes, a great whooshing sound reaches me from the wings of Canada geese, and I listen to the wind from each wingbeat.

“The greatest mistakes I’ve made in life have been those of attention,” novelist Reynolds Price once said.

Me too.

So, I speak to myself in the vocative:

‘Greg, damn it, pay attention.

Field Notes

This passage belongs to a larger spiritual work in Stories Emerge Like Bears, a forthcoming lyric memoir (2028 Cornerstone Press) where grief, water, memory, India, Big Casey Lake, loons, fathers, children, and relinquishment gather into one instruction: attention is not passive. It is a way of loving the world before it leaves us.