Light water

In search of the joy of human light flowing through dark times.

It feels like it will never stop raining. I go to sleep to the drip-run sound of water rushing from the gutters down the drainpipe at the back of the house and wake to the sound of that same new river. In the dark conservatory, dimly lit by the day’s grey light, I drink coffee under the drumming of raindrops on the glass roof. It is reminiscent of the noise of tropical showers on the galvanised roofs of my childhood, volume muted through time and space. The sound is comforting, and it makes me anxious. I listen out for the click-hum of the sump pump sunk into the small pool at the foundations of the house kicking into life, promising to drain the endlessly falling water, so that it does not wash away this ground upon which we are rooted.

There is a weather warning in place; a new storm washes over the south-west, rinsing the last vestiges of the illusions of calm and stability with it. Flood warnings exist for places that have not yet dried out from the last one. Whole neighbourhoods resignedly brace themselves against little, slipping in the already saturated mud, sliding into the fast running streams of all the yesterdays of wet. I remember the flash flood that hit my parents’ home in the Caribbean. It was disastrous. We lost many memories that day, boxes of photos and old school reports; the stories with which we had shored up our lives erased in a powerful, terrifying flow that could not be bidden.

The water is all there is now. It blooms blackly in corners on the walls, runs into tissues from my nose, seeps from my eyes with every devastating new headline. I walk a friend’s dog to escape the droning swamp of my thoughts and in the mild wet greenhouse of my waterproof coat sweat so that I am soaked to the skin, inside and out. Halfway round I stop to peel off layers. It is deliciously cool for the moment that I stand uncloaked to the true elements of the world. Then strangers round the corner. Embarrassed to be caught out standing bare in the rain I pointlessly replace the coat over my already drenched self.

The rain feels like despair and I paddle furiously so as not to drown in it, but not furiously enough because my rage has felt like too powerful a wave to withstand, threatening unbidden to wash away all the foundations of the life I have fought to build, every act of turning away a desperate switching on the sump pump of denial that holds what I know about the world in place.

The rain does not relent. It wears me down.

I walk again, and splash through the paths that have become rivers. I watch the water carve the earth to run clear against rock. I bend and feel it soft against my hand as I remember the power with which it can pound against my body as waves on the open sea. I stand and turn my face to the sky, close my eyes and open my mouth, taste the drops on my tongue like a child. It feels joyous. Something dissolves and softens within me. I yield.

I yield to the call to create. To the drip-run of niggling thoughts that wake me, that I cannot simply shake off in a spray of thoughts scattered by endless scrolling, that refuse to be solely preoccupied by the relentless needs of daily life. The ideas seep in, saturate my consciousness until the merest squeeze of grief and rage sends them pouring out, cutting new channels through the earthy pages of my life. As I pray for the safety of those affected by floodwaters without, I simultaneously submit to the flood within. Don’t we want these internalised manmade foundations that keep us propping up these systems that drown our world and us with it to be washed away? Don’t we need to rid ourselves of these false stories and partial histories, these invented memories that shore up this unjust and unnatural way of being that we have co-created through all our yesterdays?

There is a storm warning in place; we are bodies made of water. It drips from my eyes as I watch footage of devastation in this already denuded land – the loss of lives of all kinds in one of the worst affected places, one of the highest rates of loss of the natural world. Water runs down my face as I witness coverage of people in Minnesota flowing together, a wave that will not be bidden rising against the darkness ploughing through our lands.

I turn my face to the sky, seek out its wan, grey light. In these dark days it is the human light that shines more brightly, the bioluminescence of our faces, our eyes too weak to see that we shine. But can we still sense it? That we move through this world like suns, life-creators, each one of us emitting light that we cannot see?

Light moves in waves, like water. Water like the murky pools from which life emerged on this planet, light the energy that drives photosynthesis and powers all of creation. It feels like it will never stop raining. First, we were creatures of water. I close my eyes and I see the human light glinting off the deep pools of imagination that will co-create our new world. It looks joyous.