Mount Massive

Mid July I found myself sitting beside Reservoir 6 in West Hartford beneath a smoky summer sky. The smoke from wildfires burning in Ontario had drifted hundreds of miles south, softening the afternoon light and turning the sun into a muted orange disc behind a veil of gray. It was an unsettling reminder that landscapes we imagine as separate are often connected in ways we cannot see. The smoke carried the story of another forest along the jet stream into this one. 

As I watched it settle over the water, I found myself thinking about another landscape and another fire—a mountain in Colorado I had climbed with my daughter nearly six years earlier, and a wildfire now burning through the forests below it. The smoke that drifted across Connecticut had begun near Leadville, Colorado close to the trailhead where Niamh and I started our climb in July 2020. As firefighters worked to contain the blaze and nearby communities faced evacuation, the mountain I remembered as a place of celebration had become part of another story—one of drought, fire, and an increasingly fragile landscape.

Long before it became Mount Massive on modern maps, this landscape belonged to the Nuu-ciu (Ute), whose seasonal movements followed these mountains for generations. The name Sawatch is generally understood to derive from a Ute word meaning "blue earth," later adapted through Spanish before settling into English. Even the names remind us that landscapes accumulate stories layered upon one another.

Unlike so many of Colorado's fourteeners, whose names commemorate explorers, politicians, or institutions, Mount Massive is named simply for what it is. A massif is not a single mountain but a massive body of the earth's crust, a compact block of connected peaks formed through immense geological forces over unimaginable stretches of time. Mount Massive, the second highest peak in Colorado,  takes its name not from a single summit but from the five fourteen-thousand-foot summits that together form the mountain.  Its identity lies less in claiming the highest point than in the breadth of the whole. 

Mount Massive is the highest summit of that massif, but it is the massif itself that gives the mountain its name. The granite beneath our feet began forming nearly two billion years ago before tectonic uplift, glaciation, erosion, snow, water, and fire sculpted the broad shoulders that distinguish it from so many of Colorado's sharper peaks. Long before the Willow Fire appeared in newspaper headlines, periodic burns were already part of the mountain's ecological rhythm, clearing forest floors, recycling nutrients, and creating conditions for renewal.

The spring and summer of 2020 offered an unexpected interruption to ordinary life. Like many, I found myself with time that had not existed before. We were living in Summit County, Colorado, so I made a plan to climb a few of the state's fifty-three fourteeners while I had the opportunity. Turning fifty invited a kind of reckoning. Milestone birthdays have a way of asking us to pause—to look back over the life we’ve built, to measure ourselves against the hopes we once held, and to consider what remains possible. It seemed a good excuse to test myself against something that required preparation, endurance, and humility. Climbing a Colorado fourteener felt like an appropriate way to honor the moment and to set a tone for whatever came next. In ways I could never have imagined--it did.

The previous summer, my daughter had completed a six-day Outward Bound expedition around Mt. Massive Wilderness. Her group's summit attempt had been thwarted by stormy weather, and although she returned stronger and more confident, I knew she was disappointed not to have reached the top. My fiftieth birthday was the perfect excuse to try again together. The previous summer, while Niamh was on her Outward Bound expedition around Mount Massive, I climbed Quandary Peak—one of Colorado's most accessible fourteeners. Having summited it with relative ease, I assumed I understood what climbing a Colorado fourteener required. I mistook one mountain for all mountains.

By July 2020, life had become uncertain. I was quietly preparing for another international move, this time to Morocco, while selling furniture, packing boxes, and procuring a cat visa, all while navigating a world that was closed for business. Much of the early summer had been devoted to caring for my brother as he navigated a difficult period in his life. I arrived at my fiftieth birthday somewhat depleted.

We camped beside a stream near the trailhead the night before my birthday climb. The sound of moving water should have made for restful sleep, but headlights swept repeatedly across the tent as climbers drove the rough road toward the trailhead hours before sunrise. Every time another vehicle rumbled past and dust drifted beneath the rainfly, I woke wondering whether we had overslept, whether everyone else was already ahead of us, whether we had forgotten something important. Between the 10,500 ft altitude, the mountain chill, the anticipation, and the logistics of an alpine start, neither of us slept particularly well.

In the dawn light we made breakfast, organized our packs, checked our water one last time, and drove to the trailhead just in time to claim the final parking space. Immediately I began second-guessing myself. Were we starting too late? Had I underestimated the distance? Misjudged the route? Every mountain begins long before the first step on the trail and planning and preparation are the most important step of all.

The lower trail winds gradually up through dense lodgepole pine and spruce, and for several miles the mountain keeps much of itself hidden. Unlike peaks that reveal their summit almost immediately, Mount Massive unfolds gradually. The forest narrows your field of vision until your attention settles on the immediate landscape: the next switchback, exposed roots, loose rocks, birdsong filtering through the trees. Only after climbing above tree line does the horizon suddenly open in every direction. The alpine tundra stretches toward distant ridges, and you see glimpses of the summit.

It was not until I began studying eco-chaplaincy that I encountered research helping to explain why experiences like this remain so vividly embedded in memory. Neuroscientists have found that novel environments recruit more of our attention than familiar ones, creating stronger and more durable memories. Hiking at altitude demands constant physiological adjustment. Oxygen levels decrease. Breathing deepens. Muscles fatigue differently. Working memory becomes occupied with balance, hydration, weather, footing, and pacing. The brain has little capacity left for distraction because it is fully engaged with the present moment. Here I found my explanation as to why I do not remember spending hours contemplating life's deeper questions as I hiked along. I remember almost none of the miles themselves.  I remember paying attention—to the trail beneath my boots, to the changing weather, to my breathing, to my daughter's comfort, and to the growing awareness that the mountain was asking more of me than I had anticipated.

That attention also sharpened something I had not expected. Throughout Niamh's childhood I had usually been the one encouraging her forward—breaking long hikes into manageable pieces, suggesting one more bend in the trail, one more bridge, one more hill before we stopped. But she had grown into a teen now capable of carrying not only her own weight but, in small ways, mine as well. A summer spent trail running with her cross country team in Summit County had prepared her well for this massive mission.

By the time we reached the final ridge, I was tired. The granite narrowed, steep drop-offs fell away on either side, and every step demanded complete concentration. I have never been particularly comfortable with exposure, and standing on that ridge made me acutely aware of how little separated secure footing from open air. Somewhere along the final approach I noticed that Niamh had begun leaving single M&Ms on rocks ahead of me, just as I had done for her five years earlier while we hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc through France, Switzerland, and Italy.

On our Alps adventure I had scattered those bits of chocolate ahead of her when she was tired, turning the next stretch of trail into a kind of treasure hunt. Now she was quietly returning that kindness. That moment has remained with me. Her willingness to notice that I was hesitant, to encourage me without drawing attention to it, told me something about the young woman she was becoming. Whatever else I questioned about my parenting over the years, standing on that ridge I remember thinking- perhaps I got something right.

The summit was breathtaking, but it was not triumphant. It was humbling. I gazed out across the Sawatch Range, trying to absorb a landscape so vast that my imagination could scarcely contain it. I was equally aware of my own fatigue, the exposure around us, and the long journey back down. Reaching the summit is only the halfway point. What overwhelmed me was not simply the view but the perspective it offered. The trail that had occupied my attention all morning became one thin line across an immense landscape. Mount Massive itself was only one mountain among many mountains. Our climb was only one day among thousands of days in our lives. The scale of the landscape quietly recalibrated my own worries.

After photographs and contemplative moments, we turned around and began the descent. The only thought that remained was to keep walking before darkness reached the trail. After hours spent exposed above the alpine tundra, the shelter of the forest felt protective again. Clouds had begun building over the ridge behind us, and although there were still miles to walk, I knew the most exposed part of the day was over. Much of the descent has blurred with time except for one brief moment of exquisite relief when I sat beside the icy Willow Creek and plunged my aching feet into the water while the sound of the rushing creek drown out the chatter in my head. I allowed myself to imagine floating away on it. The mountain had been harder than I'd anticipated. Expectation can become its own form of debt. We pay for it whenever reality refuses to honor the stories we’ve already told ourselves.  By the time we trudged to the trailhead around six o'clock that evening, ours was the last car remaining in the parking lot.

Sitting beside Reservoir 6 beneath smoke carried across a continent, I returned to that mountain again—not because the climb itself had changed, but because I had. Between fifty and fifty-six, life accumulated in ways I could never have anticipated. There were deaths and departures, international moves, disappointments, unexpected beginnings, career collapses and pivots, profound heartbreak, and a year spent examining grief in all its forms. In retrospect-I can see now that the real prize wasn't reaching the summit. It was sharing that milestone with my daughter. From the summit I could see far more than I ever could while climbing toward it.  Had I stood at the trailhead that morning and seen the entire route at once, I might have balked and gone for birthday pancakes instead. The mountain reveals itself only as you become capable of receiving it. Perhaps, mercifully, life does the same. At the time I hadn't considered that it would be one of our last birthday adventures together.

When I read about the Willow Fire burning through the forests below Mount Massive, I found myself reading about fire ecology as well. One of sixteen active fires burning across Colorado and one of hundreds across North America, it has consumed nearly 7,100 acres since igniting through human activity on June 28 and remained only partially contained. 12 people have been injured fighting it. Somewhere in those burning acres were the forests through which we had climbed before crossing South Willow Creek and leaving the Colorado Trail for the long ascent above treeline. The granite endures while the landscape changes.

Fire destroys, but in many western ecosystems it also belongs. Some forests depend upon periodic burns for renewal. Heat opens cones that would otherwise remain closed. Nutrients return to the soil. Light reaches seedlings that could never have survived beneath a dense canopy. Fire does not erase the mountain. It changes what grows upon it.

During the past year, my chaplaincy studies required me to conduct an honest inventory of grief. That work became something much larger. Grief was only one layer. Beneath it lay decades of choices, relationships, losses, risks, mistakes, joys, sacrifices, and moments of grace. I kept excavating, hopeful that if I dug deeply enough I might grasp how those layers had shaped the life I had lived. Perhaps healing is not another excavation. It is allowing the undergrowth of regret to burn away until the granite that has always been there is revealed.  No single decision, heartbreak, success, failure, or loss explains who we become. 

Watching smoke drift across New England from fires burning hundreds of miles away, I wondered whether there comes a point when excavation itself reaches its limit. Reflection has value, but so does recognizing when enough layers have been uncovered. Some things ask to be understood. Others simply ask to be seen clearly.

Sometimes the granite remains exactly where it has always been, while everything growing upon it learns, season after season, how to begin again. It is a lesson I continue to learn.

Bears and Bereavement

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain...

There is only one question:

how to love this world.

The first bear appeared on Mother's Day last spring. I was circling Jenny Lake beneath the Tetons, carrying a grief I could neither resolve nor avoid. It was a season marked by uncertainty, loss, and remorse. Walking through nature is my way of moving through questions that have no answers. Eco-chaplaincy is teaching me how to take that personal practice and use it to accompany others through their grief.

There is a place along the trail where the trees part and the Grand Teton draws your attention upward. When I lowered my gaze, a grizzly was crossing the trail ahead of me—close enough to make me reach for the bear spray on my hip. I held my breath and watched. The bear moved without urgency, entirely unconcerned with my presence. I felt the awesome and visceral fear that being in proximity to a bear evokes. Then it wandered uphill through the sagebrush.

By the time I returned to my car, the vast, blue Wyoming sky had turned dark. Wind and a wall of rain swept across the lake. Hail pelted my car. The landscape I had walked through only hours earlier had transformed completely. The Tetons were enshrouded by clouds.

A year later, on Mother's Day, I hiked Bear Mountain in New York with my daughter. The name did not escape me. Just twelve months earlier, I had been circling Jenny Lake wondering whether I would spend the rest of my Mother's Days alone in sorrow. Now I found myself on a mountain that carried the same symbol that had followed me through that difficult year.

One week later, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of my father's death, another bear appeared. I was circling Reservoir #6 in my hometown of West Hartford. As a teenager, I trained there, dreamed there, grieved there, and returned whenever I was home. My father had walked those same trails decades earlier while battling the leukemia that eventually took his life.

The fear that had defined the previous year had softened. Hope had begun to return, though uncertainty remained, now tempered by hard-won patience and wisdom. As I walked along the shoreline, I saw a black bear bobbing in the water, cooling off on an unseasonably hot spring afternoon. He ambled out of the reservoir a short distance ahead of me on the trail, and I followed slowly behind him, my fascination outweighing my fear.

The encounter felt no less improbable than the grizzly had the year before. Two bears. Two bodies of water. Two anniversaries. Two moments when I was trying to orient myself within a life that no longer looked the way I had hoped or imagined.

The third bear appeared during a week-long immersion in death and dying as part of my chaplaincy studies. We had been asked to write a letter to our loved ones to be opened after our death. It was a beautiful June day, and the classroom felt too small to hold the weight of the question. I carried my notebook to a picnic table near the trees along the Park River—the same river Mark Twain once looked out upon while writing Huckleberry Finn, the same river the Podunk and Wangunk once fished.

As I sat there, I found myself thinking about grief and the things people carry after loss. We carry people. We carry memories. We carry unfinished conversations. We carry hopes for futures that never arrived. We carry questions that have no answers. We carry these invisible things within our hearts: regret, guilt, fear, anger, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of it all. We carry these gifts that remind us of our capacity to love. Halfway through my letter, I looked up and saw a black bear in the woods. It paused beside a tree, scratched its back, and continued on its way. Construction workers were jackhammering a block away. A dog barked at the postman. Car horns beeped. The bear seemed completely unconcerned by all of it. My letter was forgotten as I watched -mesmerized-until it disappeared.

For a long time, I thought the significance of these encounters lay in what the bears symbolized. I wondered too, why my initial inclination was to ask --what does it mean? Eventually, I became less interested in interpretation and more interested in what happened when I noticed them.

Each encounter provided a sacred pause. 

My grief loosened its grip. My breath came easier as my attention shifted away from heartache and toward what was actually present. The bears did not answer my questions. They did not resolve my grief. They didn't judge my mistakes nor were they concerned with my religious piety or practice. Sometimes symbols and stories give us a way into conversations we struggle to approach directly. We begin by talking about a bear and discover we are talking about grief. We begin by talking about a landscape and discover we are talking about belonging. That realization explains why eco-chaplaincy resonates so deeply with me.

Human beings have been seeking meaning this way for thousands of years. Long before we built seminaries, hospitals, and universities, we gathered around fires or cups of tea and tried to understand what frightened us, sustained us, and broke our hearts. We buried our dead. We watched the movement of the sun and stars. We built places like Newgrange and aligned them with the winter solstice. We left offerings beside rivers and springs. We told stories about bears.

The details differ across cultures and centuries, but the questions remain remarkably consistent. How do we live with uncertainty? How do we continue after loss? How do we find our bearings when the map we were carrying becomes obsolete? I do not know what bears imagine. They just keep living. Noticing patterns is part of what human beings do. We connect stories, places, anniversaries, and encounters in an effort to understand our lives. The bears that crossed my path became part of that process. Yet they were not only symbols. They were also real animals moving through changing landscapes.

The black bear wandering through my Hartford neighborhood was following the Park River corridor through a changing ecosystem. Connecticut's bear population has expanded dramatically during my lifetime, and bears are now found in every municipality in the state. The same encounter that invited reflection on my own life also raised questions about habitat loss, development, climate change, and coexistence. Eco-chaplaincy asks us to hold both realities at once: the personal story we tell about an encounter and the ecological reality in which that encounter occurs. Perhaps we have always been seeking orientation rather than certainty.

Years ago, while earning an M.Phil. in Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin, I studied the root causes of conflict and the pathways toward reconciliation. I learned that most conflicts are not really about the thing being argued. Beneath positions lie stories. Beneath stories lie fears. Beneath fears lie needs for belonging, dignity, safety, recognition, and love. Chaplaincy asks many of the same questions, but on a more personal scale. What is this person carrying? What loss remains unnamed? What story are they telling themselves about what has happened? Before people can make meaning from suffering, they need someone willing to witness it. Chaplaincy requires learning to listen beneath the surface of a person's story, noticing the fears, losses, and longings within it. Eco-chaplaincy is not about finding answers in nature. It is about cultivating the pause that allows discernment to emerge. The work is not to provide answers or impose meaning. It is to listen carefully enough to distill what lies beneath the story being told.

My path to eco-chaplaincy began long before graduate school. It began beside reservoirs and rivers, within forests, and on top of mountains. It began through loss, wonder, noticing, and accompaniment. Eco-chaplaincy simply gave language to something I had been practicing for much of my life: the privilege of witness.

An Caol Áit: A Thin Place

 

There is a phrase in Irish—An Caol Áit. A thin place. A threshold. A moment when the boundary between what was and what is becomes less certain, when time does not move cleanly forward, but gathers.

There are moments when time thins, when everything is closer than it should be. This past week or so has felt like that. My daughter’s nineteenth birthday. My father’s ninety-eighth. The fourth anniversary of Colin’s death. The birthday of someone I once loved. Easter. Good Friday. Ramadan. A rejection from Yale Divinity School. A job rejection. All of it sitting inside the same narrow span of days. Different versions of my life, different versions of myself, drawing closer together. Not in sequence. All at once.

It is hard not to feel the compression of it, the sense that what was is not past, that what is here now is not separate from it. There are traditions that understand time this way. In Tír na nÓg, time does not move as we expect it to. A short stay becomes a lifetime. A lifetime becomes something else entirely. In moments like this, that feels less like myth than recognition.

There are periods of time that are not lived in the usual way. The day continues—you show up, you speak, you move through what is required—but none of it is where your attention is held. You are waiting for a moment that will determine what comes next. Everything else becomes background. Time reduces itself to a single point of focus.

And still, life insists on itself. There are decisions to make. Logistics to manage. Things that cannot wait, even when everything inside you is waiting. You keep moving. Not because you are especially strong, but because there is no other option.

There are moments that divide a life. Who you were before them and who you are after are not the same. The day we were told Colin would be taken off life support was one of those moments. It was more than loss. It was hope floating away like a lost balloon. It was the collapse of a way of understanding. What you lose in a moment like that is the idea that there is still time to fix things—that whatever was unfinished might still be repaired, that there will be another conversation. That possibility disappears, not gradually, but all at once.

When someone is dying, time goes very fast. It collapses and rushes forward. When you are estranged from someone, time goes very, very slow. Each day stretches. The absence repeats itself. Nothing replaces it. You wait in the doldrums. I understand now how the sailors felt.

We measure time in moments—the ones that hold, the ones that rupture, the ones we wish we could undo. But there are other ways we are taught to measure time—in minutes, in counts, in units meant to keep something going. We measure to survive.

Counting has always been a way through uncertainty. In CPR, you count to keep someone alive—compressions, breaths, rhythm, over and over, holding the sequence because the sequence is what stands between life and loss. In the mountains, you count the seconds between lightning and thunder, tracking the distance of the storm, measuring risk in real time. Each number carries consequence. Each one tells you whether to move, to wait, to take cover.

Counting becomes a form of control when control is otherwise gone. A way of staying inside something long enough to get through it.

I have found myself measuring time in another way. In the last two months, as these anniversaries approached, I began using a daimoku app that counts my chants. It tracks how many times I chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, how many minutes, how many hours. At first, it felt like a way to make the effort visible, to give form to something that otherwise disappears as soon as it is spoken. I started setting numbers for myself—just another thousand, then another, then another. The counting becomes its own rhythm, something to move toward, something to complete.

Each repetition is meant to matter. Each one, in some way, to repair. I find myself attaching meaning to the numbers, imagining that I am not just moving through time, but altering it—healing karma, healing what has already happened, what is happening now, what might otherwise carry forward. Most often, I am imagining her—my daughter—her heart—trying to reach something in her that I cannot reach directly, trying to lighten what she is carrying so that it does not break her spirit in the way that mine has been.

And yet, like the other ways I have measured time, it does not resolve what I am inside of. The numbers accumulate. The effort is real. But what I am waiting for does not arrive on command. What is the magic number? How many chants are enough? Enough for accountability? For forgiveness? For reconciliation? For recalibration?

The moments that feel most final—the ones that seem to seal something shut—are not actually contained in the way they feel. They are experienced that way, but they exist inside something larger than what can be seen from within them. We give those moments enormous weight, as if they define everything that came before and everything that will come after. That may not be true. It may only be how they feel while we are inside them. Feeling is not the same as finality.

There is a teaching by Pema Chödrön that this moment can be a teacher—that when we reach what feels like the edge, the instruction is not to harden or escape, but to stay.  To soften into what is here, even when it is not what we would have chosen. Not as resignation, but as a way of remaining in contact with what is still alive within it.

Staying is not theoretical. I have done it before.

In labor, the contractions came closer together. Five minutes. Three. Two. Time reduced to intervals—something to brace against, something to get through. And underneath it, another rhythm—the steady sound of her heartbeat, one hundred and forty beats per minute. Life continued, whether anything was progressing or not.

The contractions intensified, but nothing opened.

I remember how the rhythm on her heart monitor shifted when she went into distress. 140 beats per minute turned into 160. Someone said- that baby needs to come out- now. The mood of the room shifted instantly—swiftly, silently. I didn’t fully understand why. I could feel it, though—the way voices lowered, the way movements became more precise, the way attention narrowed.

Within the hour, she was born. It was very quiet. No crying. Not from her. Not from me. They had already seen the meconium. They took her immediately to check her lungs. I could hear voices, but not the words.

I was still on the table, numb from the waist down, legs akimbo. No one at my shoulder. No one telling me what was happening. I remember asking, quietly, is everything okay? No one answered directly.

It had been nearly twenty-four hours. I was exhausted, slightly outside of myself. Listening. Fading.

That was the beginning.

I have been here before.

At the beginning of her life, I was alone. In every way that matters—in my body, carrying it, enduring it, bringing her into the world.

And at the moment her father died, I was alone again. Not in the same room, not in the same way—but in the knowing of it, in the way it would land, in the way it would change everything that came after.

These are the two fixed points of her life as I have lived it—her birth and his death, just six days apart on the calendar.

I was there for both.

And now I am not there at all.

Time does not always move in one direction. It stretches. It stalls. It folds back on itself. There are stretches of life that feel full and intact, and others that feel flattened—not because nothing happened, but because something essential was missing.

What gives a life its shape is not only what happens, but who is there to witness it. And even when you are not alone, you notice the empty chair.

In my daughter’s first year of life, I witnessed everything alone—her first smile, her first word, her first steps, the small things that are not small at all. In this past year, I have not been there to witness her life. Whatever is happening to her now—her formation, her milestones, her becoming—I am not there to see it. I am not there to celebrate her. I wonder if she feels the loss as much as I do.

Estrangement removes the witness, but it does not erase the space where that witness would have been. An empty chair is still an empty chair. 

There is another way time distorts—when it is measured on someone else’s clock. Waiting for someone to come back, to understand, to decide that you are worth showing up for. Time passes, but it does not move forward. It stalls.

I have spent years inside that kind of time. Waiting for people to show up, to take responsibility, to meet me where I was already standing. Waiting for something to resolve that never did.

Sometimes, it does not resolve.

People do not return. Conversations do not happen. And then people die. And it is over. The clock stops.

Time does not fix what people refuse to repair.

Time moves in one direction, whether it is moving too fast or too slow. And so what remains is not control, but attention. What you saw. What you missed. What you were there for. What you were not. What you think you remember. What you wish you could forget.

Today would have been my father’s ninety-eighth birthday. Friday was my daughter’s nineteenth. Thursday is the day that Colin died.

That is one way to measure time.

But it is not the only one.

There is also what is still possible to witness, what is still possible to return to, what is not yet fixed. Even now, time is not only closing. It is also opening—quietly, without announcement, in moments that do not yet know what they will become.

At the reservoir early this morning, as I finished chanting, a Great Blue Heron was perched in the tree across the water, twenty or thirty feet up. It stood there for a time, surveying the surface of the water. Then without any urgency, it lifted, crossed low over the water and landed at the edge. Nothing about it felt rushed. Or stalled. I watched it longer than I meant to.

Attention is not only how we mark what has been lost. It is how we recognize what has not yet disappeared. And what is yet to come. 

Holding the Current

I’ve been treading water in that place Gibran writes of—where the river meets the sea—fighting the currents, unsure of what comes next. The fear, of course, is not the water itself, but the moment you can no longer remain where you are and cannot yet find your way forward. There is fear too in losing your bearings—no longer knowing yourself as you did before.

Water is the beginning of life. We are held in it before we are born. Our waters break to bring us into the world. Across religious traditions, water signifies cleansing, renewal, and transition—whether in baptism, ritual washing, or practices like Loy Krathong, where offerings are set afloat and carried downstream. These rituals remind us that without water there is no life. It regulates climate, sustains ecosystems, and makes all life possible.

And yet water is not benign. It can carry disease, flood cities, pull us under, take our breath. It resists control. It reminds us how dependent we are and how vulnerable. Even where it sustains life, it is never fixed. It rises, recedes, shifts direction. It does not conform to our expectations.

Some theologians and ecological thinkers have suggested that returning rituals like baptism to living waters—rivers, lakes, and streams—can deepen our sense of connection to the ecosystems that sustain us. To stand in moving water, to feel its temperature and force, is different from encountering it conceptually. Perhaps ritual does not create the sacredness of water so much as give us language for what we already sense.

The tension between water as release and water as containment—is highlighted in the film Water: Hindu widows live out their lives along the river—surrounded by a symbol of purification and release. They are also confined and marginalized by their religion and society's constructs around identities defined by loss. The story centers on a child—widowed before she has even grown into the life she was assigned—absorbed into that system without consent, without any path back to who she might have been.

That dynamic feels familiar to me. I am not widowed as society defines it, but the tragic loss of my daughter's father places me within that condition—the way a life's memories and hopes are reshaped around absence. It is a narrowing under the weight of what has been taken, even when the loss doesn't fit neatly into the categories we use to name it.

When loss fits a recognized form, people know how to respond. There are rituals, language, roles that organize care around those who are grieving. When it does not, there is a kind of silence—not intentional, but felt nonetheless—where structures that might hold you simply do not appear.

In that absence, one is left holding what is still as real but less easily named—suspended in that place where the river meets the sea, swirling without direction, unable to find the current.

My own relationship with water has never been abstract. I tend toward motion—body and mind always active. But when I sit beside water—a river, a reservoir, the ocean—something shifts. My attention settles into the movement of the water—the ripples, the current lapping the shore. The sound envelopes me and I find solace within it.

A deeper sense of peace comes from time spent with the people I love. Those moments—rare, fleeting—when everything aligns and you feel held within something larger than yourself, where nothing needs to be added or explained. Those are the moments I have spent my life trying to return to. Memories of such moments often overshadow any of the mistakes or misunderstandings that shaped the relationship.

Lately, water has become the place I go when I don’t know what to do with what I've now been carrying for far too long.

There are times when this feels less like forward movement and more like trying to hold position in something that will not settle. Not drowning, but not being carried either. The river does not get to stop. It meets what comes—rocks, bends, barriers—and finds a way through or around. It continues, regardless of conditions.

There is another kind of place water gathers—the place Gibran names in his poem—where the river meets the sea but does not yet become it. Estuaries are not calm. Tides push in as currents pull out. Fresh and salt water mix unevenly, and salinity shifts constantly. Nothing stabilizes. And yet life exists precisely because of that instability. Species that survive in estuaries are not fixed; they adjust continuously to changing conditions, to what the water brings in each moment.

I recognize that kind of place now—not as a crossing, but as a condition. Not having arrived, not having let go, but living inside the mix of what was and what is. It is not stillness. It is not resolution. It is the movement toward discernment and whatever comes after loss.

Sometimes it feels like being caught in an eddy—circling, moving but not progressing, pulled into a pattern that does not release. The panic there is different. It is not the shock of impact or the force of a breaking wave. It is the realization that you can keep moving and still not go anywhere. That you may remain there longer than you thought possible. The fear Gibran writes of is not the sea. It is where the struggle to orient ends. What I fear is becoming caught in the circling, unable to find the current again.

The way out is not force. As with riptides, fighting an eddy will lead only to exhaustion—not escape. The only way out is at the seam—the place where the circling water meets the larger flow. And finding that seam requires something that is not instinctive in moments of fear. It requires a steadiness of attention—the ability to remain present enough to notice where movement is still possible. If I am overwhelmed, I miss it. If I am avoiding, I never reach it. This is the work now—not to force resolution, not to become numb to what I feel, but to remain steady enough to recognize the moment when something shifts.

This week marks one year since I’ve seen my daughter, heard her voice, hugged her and made her a morning cup of tea. Today marks four years since her father was hit by a car and never woke up. We have had some trouble learning to live with that. Loss does not only take people. It takes the imagined future alongside them. The version of life you thought you were moving toward dissolves, and with it, the self that existed within that future. I had imagined that over time he would have become a more consistent and meaningful presence in her life—that there would be shared moments: graduations, rugby matches, milestones, where we would stand together as her parents. Having lost my own father at twenty, I only ever had an imagined version of what that might be like. That story is gone, and my heart aches for what she has lost. And now, even the version where it would be just the two of us—or just me, alone, cheering her on as it always has been—has fractured as well.

There are losses that are visible and named, and others that are not. There are moments when your role is to hold space for someone else’s grief, to ensure they are supported, while your own goes unacknowledged. That absence does not pass quickly. It settles. It leaves a residue, a shadow over everything else.

Since my return here, I have been drawn back to a place I used to go as a teenager—Reservoir 6—where I would sit and watch the sunset, where I would jump from the rocks in the summer. When I visited the other day, I noticed a bowl of fruit left on the stones near where I sit and chant. It seemed an offering of sorts. It reminded me of the spirit houses I had seen in Thailand, where people leave small tokens by water. Months ago, I had left a small feather there—an offering of my own. It had been a small attempt at a symbolic release of someone I once loved. When I came back again, the wind had carried the feather away, and flowers had been arranged in its place.

I am not the only one who comes to that water carrying something. I am not the only one seeking solace there. That shared instinct—to pause, to leave something behind, to mark a moment—feels sacred in itself. Perhaps ritual does not make water sacred so much as help us recognize what is already present. Across traditions, people return to water at moments of transition—birth, loss, renewal—not only because they are taught to do so, but because something in those places holds their heart.

I am still in that place where the river meets the sea. The currents pull in more than one direction. There are moments of turbulence, moments of circling, moments where I cannot see what comes next. But there are also moments—brief, subtle—where something shifts. A faint pull at the edge of the circling. A moment to catch my breath.

Out of the confusion, where the river meets the sea, something new will arrive.