There is a place just at the top of Niagara Falls which is hypnotic. The river runs right beneath the railing, and the edge of the falls is just there. The water roars past and races over the edge.
Water can also be so still the surface is like a mirror. On a day with no wind, the surface of a lake will reflect the trees, clouds and sky, the face of the person looking down. There seems to be no motion at all. Our pond is like that these mornings, but under that still surface, water is moving. In this season, it pours through the culvert under the lane and on into the marsh.
In a river, you can see the movement as water pours over rocks, heads down stream carrying a leaf, a stick, whatever falls in. When you stand in one spot, a constant pattern of white and blue and green is formed, but it is never the same water.
Rain falls and then seeps into the garden, the lawn. It runs down the driveway and across the road. It comes close to stillness when the rain finds a low spot and makes a puddle. In dry places, these are a gift: a kettle lake, or a kettle well can collect water for people and animals. But even there, it will slowly evaporate from the surface, moving from liquid to air. And a kettle lake is vulnerable: bedrock or heavy clay forms a bowl to hold the water, but if you pierce the bowl the water will leak away.
Water looks for places to go. It can seep through dirt, gravel, cracks in the rock. In a moraine, as it seeps down into the ground, it is cleansed. Where bedrock is fractured, it finds its way into the aquafers carrying whatever pollution it picked up as it ran across the ground.
Before we moved to our farm, the settlers here relied on water collected into cisterns. And although there was a dug well for the animals and one down in the swamp that the house could draw from, there were cisterns behind the house, beside the tool shed and out in the barn. Every bit of rain was collected. If water is left in a cistern, it tastes stale, but given how many animals there were in the barn and the size of the family, the water did not sit very long.
Water is not still. It has a cycle: evaporating into the air from lake and ocean, moving on the wind, falling as rain or snow, running across the surface, seeping down into deep aquafers. The movement of water is a good thing because it is essential for life--human, animal and plant.
There are problems. There is drought in parts of Africa right now. There are floods, as there were in Houston last week, when rains are torrential. Climate change is affecting weather patterns. But the natural behaviour of water is to keep moving and to nourish the earth where it flows.
If we look at a community the way we look at a river or a pond, we can see that there is movement, a flow that nourishes life. There is a flow of food and a flow of love. In any group, there is a flow of comfort and a flow of money. Knowledge is shared, and technical skills are offered. Each action offered is a gift. Like the flow of water, each offering nourishes others. When someone offers an act of peace to another person, the person who receives it is able to live their life in a more peaceful way, nourishing peace in others.
A community or an institution can seem static: there is a reluctance to change and to move. But under the surface, there is a flow of life between people as well as connections with the world around. The gifts of each person are the water that nourish that community. A person may feel out of place, and some feel they have little to offer. But each gift of gentleness, each touch of grace is the water of community life nourishing others as we are nourished by those who touch us.
Cathy Hird is a farmer, minister and writer living near Walters Falls.
