Lifeblood

Re-enchanting the hydrologic cycle

Sunset over Lake Pepin, from Pepin, WI. February 24, 2024. Photo by the author.

We have all learned the hydrologic cycle at some point.  Evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration, runoff.  Water moves from the oceans to the atmosphere, falling as rain and moving through rivers and lakes and groundwater back to the ocean.  Label the diagram correctly and hand it in.

Let’s try that again.

Science can both enhance and diminish our sense of wonder.  The more we understand about our solar system, our Sun and Moon, our atmosphere, our biosphere, our planet’s geology, the inner workings of cells and molecules, the more amazing and awe-inspiring our existence and universe becomes.  And yet modern science would try to make a claim that it can ultimately explain everything, that we live in a mechanistic world that exists by happenstance, in which humans and stars and planets have blundered into existence through the chaotic unfolding of random processes and natural laws.  Modern science would also like to claim that the only real alternative to this paradigm is a worldview in which everything was created by an all-powerful deity – a perspective that it feels confident debunking and thereby establishing its dominance.

I tend to believe –or perhaps I should even say know deep in my bones – that we and all life and all matter are aspects of a universal consciousness that seeks self-expression and embodiment.  There are physical laws within which this ongoing creation unfolds, but beyond a certain scale of complex systems the future of weather or of species evolution cannot be predicted.  And every scientific explanation rests upon another and upon another and ultimately upon a mystery.  We do not and cannot know why protons and neutrons and electrons exist as they do, such that they interact to form atoms and water molecules and DNA and cells and bodies that exist as they do.

So let us release the mind, and follow the water.

Of the vast amounts of energy reaching Earth from the Sun, fully one quarter energizes water molecules, flipping them individually from liquid to vapor.  This is two thousand times more than the sum total of human industry, and yet it is entirely silent and invisible.  As the morning dew dries, as leaves transpire, as fog lifts, as summer sun beams down on lakes and oceans, energy is being transformed that will ultimately become thunder and lightning, all of the world’s rivers, rain and snow and sleet and hail - that will, over eons, carve valleys and nourish floodplains and wear away rocks and flatten mountains.

The next miracle is one of eddies and currents and concentration.  Water is evaporating everywhere the sun is shining, and this warm air and water vapor begins to rise, to move, to circulate.  As it rises, it cools, and as it cools water begins to condense.  Condensation releases heat, re-warming the air so it continues to rise in pockets and patterns.  Clouds form in infinite variety.  Popcorn cumulus.  Mackerel sky.  Mare’s tails.  Resplendent sunrises and plays of light and shadow.  Fog rolling over hills and dispersing into dry air.  From the scale of rain showers to massive weather systems, the silent solar energy of evaporation is concentrated and condensed and transformed, positive feedback pulling in warm moist air from all around, whipping up winds and sending cloud tops to the stratosphere, creating “atmospheric rivers” that dwarf their land-based analogues in volume and velocity.

Have you ever stood on a mountaintop or headland, facing into a Pacific storm, leaning into an 80-mph wind?  Or laid down on a Midwestern prairie in a blizzard, feeling the sting of windblown snow with each gust?  Or frolicked in a summer thunderstorm?  Some would call it dangerous, severe, best avoided.  I call it exhilarating.  How exactly does sunshine become this wild abandon?  And how blessed are we to be alive, embodied, to experience it?

Concentrate this energy enough and it creates its own lights and soundtrack, as if it is having a party.  Lightning is fire, borne of water, carried by air, falling to earth.  It defies most logic.  We are used to static electricity in dry conditions, and yet water droplets in saturated storms move enough charge to generate vast arcs of ionized air, dissipating immense energies as electricity and sound, all of which began as evaporation under clear skies.  The radio advises to stay inside, to seek shelter.  I would rather join the celebration, add my own voice to the chorus.  Yes, lightning could strike me, one in a million.  That is a risk I am willing to take, to be present and fully alive.

Often enough, when the party ends, the sun shines through the last drops and splits into arcs of color, framing the sky, sometimes double, illuminating a million droplets on every branch and leaf.  Refraction, yes, I know, but why?  Why must light behave this way, different wavelengths bending at slightly different angles inside a billion raindrops to project a rainbow?  Could it be that the universe wishes to create beauty, and this is but one of many examples, a traveling banner to celebrate the return of lifeblood to the Earth?

And then there are snowflakes.  Have you ever looked at them closely, each one its own transient masterpiece?  Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley devoted much of his life to photographing them, to appreciating their infinite intricacy.  His images are remarkable and defy all explanation.  Yes, water forms hexagonal crystals, but how can nascent snowflakes tumbling wildly through saturated air maintain and build their unique and delicate symmetry as they form?  If we imagine a water molecule as the size of a cat, a snowflake is proportionally 500 miles across.  How does each possibly know where to freeze on so as to balance the pattern?  It would seem that each snowflake has a unique geometric resonance, a unifying intention.  Perhaps there is beauty and creativity inherent in the molecular structure of water, seeking self-expression.  Beyond the bounds of science lies a beautiful mystery, one which I pledge to appreciate, not merely to shovel.

Whether deposited as rain or snow or sleet or hail or dew or mist or fog or frost, water is once again dispersed and silent, full of potential.  Wherever it lands it becomes the lifeblood of roots and mycelium, dissolving rocks and gathering nutrients from last year’s decomposition.  And from there it becomes the lifeblood of leaves, and some of it is split by the magic of photosynthesis to be water no more, to become the oxygen that we breathe in and convert back to water in our mitochondria.  Some of it soaks deep into soil where it nourishes trees through drought, and deeper still beyond their reach where it recharges aquifers, feeding the springs and wells from which we drink, from which it becomes, for a time, our lifeblood. 

And some of it begins to gather in puddles and ponds, or flows subtly across grasslands and through forest swales.  And from there it enters nameless rivulets and channels that flow for a few hours or days during rain and snowmelt.  And from there into neighborhood streams with secret names known only by those who live there.  And then suddenly it appears on our maps as a blue line with a label, and from there we know the story.

The inflow, the concentration of water from evaporation into weather systems, is invisible, dynamic, ever changing – the arteries in the sky from the everywhere sunlight-heart to the tissues of the land.  The outflow, the movement from capillaries into veins, the concentration of water from the landscape through creeks into ever-larger and ever-more-powerful rivers, is so central to our story as to have defined the locations of our cities and the boundaries of our nations.   Rivers grind mountains to pebbles and eventually to dust, carry minerals raised by volcanoes and tectonic collisions to be deposited across fertile floodplains.  Rivers are both barriers to our movement, boundaries to our wanderings, and conduits for commerce, for salmon migrations, for canoes riding the currents borne of everywhere upstream, carrying stories and stones and sturgeon.

Rivers carry only a tiny fraction of the energy that enters the water cycle, most of it being released in condensation and in the long fall to Earth.  But river energy is still immense, on a human scale.  Rivers have ground our grains and powered our mills for centuries, and I am most likely writing this with river power, from one of the massive dams on the Columbia that each generate enough electricity for a million or more human homes.  If you live in the Pacific Northwest and turn on your dryer or take a hot shower or check your email or make your morning coffee, give thanks to a river.  Your energy most likely started as sunlight, transformed to water vapor, condensed into clouds, fell to earth, percolated into creeks, and flowed into mighty rivers where it drove the turbines that turned the generators that energized the wires that end at each of your outlets.

At the mouths of rivers great and small are deltas and estuaries and bays, dynamic and diverse waterscapes where flow and salinity changes with the tides, where channels shift daily, where curlews and plovers probe for wriggling life in the rich alluvial mud.  The other boundaries are sharp, from liquid to vapor, from vapor to cloud, from raindrop to Earth, but this one is different.  We cannot say for sure exactly where river ends and ocean begins, and this fluid interbeing weaves a shifting tapestry of life: mangroves, mudflats, vast flocks of shorebirds and waterbirds, fish migrations, sea lions, seals, otters, eagles, and gritty, resilient human settlements that move with the soils, leaving the ruins of old piers and jetties to be reclaimed by barnacles and crabs.

We call it a cycle, and yet it is more of a universe of possibilities and pathways, converging and diverging and forever weaving.  Some water molecules spend millions of years in the oceans without ever evaporating, traveling the vast network of currents that circles the globe.  Some are locked, for a time, in the depths of the living, shifting ice we call glaciers, grinding away mountain peaks and creating new soil before eventually melting and returning to the sea.  Some rise from leaves and rivers and our own outbreath, re-entering the atmosphere to fall as rain downwind.  Some fall into rainforests and fill bromeliads where they nurture the tadpoles of jewel-toned frogs.  Some ride monsoons into deserts where they are quickly captured by parched roots, swelling buds and bursting forth in ephemeral bloom before evaporating once more.  Some squeeze their way deep into the crust, commingling with magma and following old faultlines to emerge as hot springs beneath towering firs. 

We inhabit a water planet.  Life began in the oceans, and all who live on land carry oceans within us, in our briny blood and our sweet sap: balanced internal water bodies that move in their own currents, that nurture and nourish our cells. 

I give thanks to the rain, each drop a gift of renewal.  I sit quietly beside small streams and great rivers, hearing their stories and feeling their serene power, borne of distant sunlight and storm winds.  I honor the lifeblood of Earth, in all of its forms and flows.

Happy Equinox everyone!