Carol Bass, artist, friend and inspiration to many, lived in Maine for years before she recently returned to the land of her origin in South Carolina. The gradual effects of multiple sclerosis had made Maine winters too difficult. Balance and mobility diminished but not her creativity and commitment to life. Anyone who knows Carol’s art has seen both in the bold colors and designs of her work.
Among Carol’s passions is the environment, and these days the degradation by agribusiness of her beloved Edisto River, along whose banks and in whose waters her childhood spirit flourished.
Carol is putting together an anthology of Southern river literature and art, which will be published this fall by Joggling Board Press. She asked if I would write a piece for the book, and this is what I sent and she received with her customary enthusiasm and affection.
Water and a River
Water speaks a language of surround and leveling, refraction and cascade, of crashing, drowning, floating, swimming, surfing, splashing, playing, power, majesty and depth. But most of all water speaks of life. There is life in it and every living thing on Earth depends on water for its existence.
We live on a water planet and until recently in our history most of us have taken water for granted, asked only how it can be of use to us. That’s not a bad question. We need water to stay alive. But by itself it is a question short on wisdom. It is a two-dimensional question without spiritual depth. Two-dimensional living uses language such as “them and us,” “win or lose,” “top dog, bottom dog,” “the one with the most toys at the end wins.”
A three-dimensional question is: “How can water be of use to us and how can we be of use to water?” With that question the division, the boundaries between us and, in this case, water begin to dissolve.
Frank Waters, in his book, “The Man Who Killed a Deer,” tells of the Pueblo Indian practice of the hunter honoring the deer before he or she takes its life. The hunter says the tribal words that affirm the deer’s sacred life, its right to be, promising to use it well in the continuation of his life and that of his family and tribe. Included in the ritual is an expression of gratitude to the Great Spirit, the Creator revealed in each and all creatures. Then the hunter, one with the deer, not deserving of nor superior to it, kills it.
A Pueblo man, taken from his tribe as a child and educated in U.S. government schools, returned to the tribe having forgotten or choosing to disregard the rituals. He kills a deer without gratitude, without promises, without speaking of the sacredness of the life before him before he took it. He was blinded by Western European education to the oneness, the interdependence of all creation. For reasons he doesn’t understand, he is then haunted to despair by the spirit of the deer. It is by struggling through the despair that he begins to see the boundaries between him and the deer dissolving.
Henry David Thoreau writes in his journal of a day on Walden Pond that is so close to his hometown, Concord, Massachusetts, that he can hear its church bells. “Drifting in a sultry day on the sluggish waters of the pond, I almost cease to live – and begin to be. A boat-man stretched on the deck of his craft, and dallying with the noon, would be as apt an emblem of eternity for me, as the serpent with his tail in his mouth. I am never so prone to lose my identity. I am dissolved in the haze.” He concludes this paragraph with these words: “I am evaporating airs ascending into the sun.”
Reflecting on this passage Douglas E. Christie in his superb book, “The Blue Sapphire of the Mind,” subtitled “Notes for a Contemplative Ecology,” wrote: “These journal entries reveal a similar concern – one that Thoreau never lost – to describe and understand that particular moment when a previously clear boundary between the self and the wider world begins to dissolve and become permeable.”
Looking at the Edisto River, named after a noble Indian tribe, running through what is now called South Carolina, what do you see? Is your vision two-dimensional or three-? Can you hear the music it makes with wind and gravity, see the beauty of the art it makes with sun and moonlight? Have you moved with it as it performs its slow then flowing dance? Have you taken the time to get to know it for itself, not just for its usefulness? Have you honored the life it nurtures? Have you ever said something to it like the Pueblo sacred words? Have you gone beyond asking what it can do for you and asked what you can do for it? It deserves such kindness, such consideration. If you have done these things, perhaps you found yourself in a moment, the ultimate gift of three-dimensional seeing, of experiencing the dissolution of boundaries between you.
Bill Gregory is a writer, teacher, retired minister ordained in the United Church of Christ. He lives in Yarmouth and can be reached at wgregor1@maine.rr.com.
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