Writing from the River and the Pond

In driving this past weekend to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, I was given a lot of time to sit and think. This little place was right at the border of Georgia and South Carolina, and we were there to play Dungeons and Dragons with a group of some of the best guys I've ever met in my whole life. Okay, taken together, they might be the good guys I've met, save a male friend or two here or there. Sorry - let me clarify a little. This has so much more to do with them and me than the rest of the men on this planet. These guys are dynamic, intelligent, and healthy in their masculinity. 

I think that in today's society, this is hard to find - men who are in touch with their emotions, men who are loving, men who say "I love you" to their friends, men who genuinely support one another beyond sports ball or drinking. I mean, there was drinking. Don't get me wrong. If shooting each other randomly with Nerf guns count as sport hunting, then we're totally guilty of that too. But it was fun. I would like to tell you that I left my laptop and didn't work on research, writing, and the ever-present EndNote catalog of sources I am compiling, but that would be a lie. Everyone understood, even when I was pecking at my keyboard while rolling damage against an adult white dragon on an airship.

But back to that car ride. 

I was listening to Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass (2020) on Audible (read by the author!), and her words were washing over me. In her words, the pond in her chapter A Mother's Work became a rich extended metaphor for ways of knowing. This is the part of the beauty of Kimmerer's prose; she weaves stances, lenses, and ways of seeing the world into segmented stories about her life. This particular chapter focuses on ways of knowing a pond by her home. She is attempting to clean it. At first, she is standing on the edge and using tools to dredge the bottom, thick with algae. Then she climbs into the dark water. First, she enters her ankles before going deeper and deeper; it is not until she feels tadpoles at the back of her knees that she realizes how close she is to being too deep. The threat of drowning crosses her mind. This chapter explores themes of balance in her exploration of ethics, nature, and motherhood.

I was thinking about what she was saying about not being able to know something until she got down into the water and truly experienced it. It was a way of knowing the pond, and its water, more deeply. That's when it hit me; I've read about this epistemological stance (and metaphor) before in G. Lynn Nelson's book Writing and Being (2004).

Nelson writes:

To begin to “write real,” as my students sometimes call it (that is, to keep a journal and to write from our hearts and our feelings) is to enter the river of our writing and being. This is a different matter from standing on the bank of the river and studying writing, or writing strictly formal papers that are divorced from our feelings and our being. There are two ways to know the river (and the “river” is anything, everything). One way to know the river is to stand upon the bank and measure and analyze it. The river is so many feet wide, so many feet deep, so many miles long. There are so many gallons of water per minute passing any given point. We could dip into the river with test tubes and analyze the constituents of the water. We could measure the temperature of the water. We could identify and label the creatures that live in the water. In this way, we could come to “know” the river—punch the data into our computers, carry a printout in our briefcases, become “experts.” But this would be only one way of knowing the river, and a narrow and illusory way at that. The great danger is that we might come to believe that the river we knew in the boxes of our minds was the “real” river, that we would separate ourselves from the real river, that we would have no dynamic relationship with the reality. Then the river would be dead for us, and we would be dead in relation to it. We would be incapable of seeing the real river or loving the river. We would be lost and bored behind our hard eyes and our expert minds.

I think a lot about this passage. I have every year I've taught. It always leaves me with so many questions and so much to ponder. Every year we travel along the river, and as a consequence, it looks different to us as time passes. I might even argue that we have a hand in shaping the river as we go. Just like Dr. Kimmerer was stating, Nelson echos that there are many ways of knowing: ut none of them are the whole of anything. The danger is not knowing the soul.

My best friend and mentor Dr. Kyle Jones, wrote me something recently for my graduation. It now hangs on the wall beside my desk as a reminder. It is a cautionary warning about becoming an expert and losing the soul of what you are doing. "There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist." - Christian Wimon

This is also a way of knowing. There are many streams, and as I climb in like others have done before me, I have to remember why I am here: to know the soul, not just the science. 

Kimmerer, R. W. (2020). Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions. 

Nelson, G. L. (2004). Writing and being: taking back our lives through the power of language. Inner Ocean Pub.