The Country of Puddles
After a good hard rain, there is a country of puddles.
Kids know this country before adults do. A puddle is the entire reason to own rainboots. The reason to wear the wrong shoes and get yelled at and love it anyway. A puddle is a small pond that agreed to be here for the afternoon.
Watch one long enough and you start noticing things.
There are water striders skating the surface, little insects that hatched inside a world made entirely of this puddle. In spring puddles there are sometimes tadpoles, and those tadpoles have a deadline they don't know about. The sun is a clock they can't see. Every hour the puddle is smaller. A tadpole in a drying puddle is an entire childhood on a timer.
The water in the puddle is a stranger visiting. It was clouds yesterday. It was ocean a week ago. Before that it was in the belly of a fish. Before that it was a raindrop that fell on Madagascar. Before that it may have been a comet. Before that it was the inside of a star. Water has been around, in one form or another, for roughly thirteen and a half billion years. The hydrogen is nearly as old as time itself. The oxygen was forged in a long-dead star that exploded to make room for our sun. Each droplet on your windshield, at the edge of a parking lot, is — if you trace it back far enough — older than the Earth.
The thing we call "the water cycle" is not continuous at any point you can point at. It is oceans that become clouds that become rivers that become seas again, with detours through redwood sap and human tears and the insides of whales. Every arrow on that diagram is a handoff. Every handoff is an ending. The cloud has to stop being a cloud to become rain. The rain has to stop being rain to become river. The river has to stop being river to become ocean. The only way to be the thing that persists is to keep ending, over and over.
A friend once said something to me that I can't stop turning over: revel in your discontinuity, and grieve it deeply as part of the thing.
The grief part is important. I think we skip it sometimes, in our rush to reassure ourselves that everything is connected. We say everything flows into everything, nothing is really lost and we mean it as a comfort. But look at the puddle again. There is a real sense in which that water was a river once, and the river is gone. The ocean is gone, for this particular set of molecules, in this particular place. The tadpole does not get to be a tadpole for long. Something has been lost, in the way that loss actually feels. The fact that it will be found again somewhere else, in another shape, does not cancel the loss.
And still.
The puddle is real water. I want to be very clear about this. It is not a lesser water. A tadpole in a puddle is not in a worse pond than a fish in a lake. It is in the pond that is here. The topology is different, not worse. Every property that makes water water is still going on — the hydrogen bonds still hydrogen-bonding, the sunlight still refracting, small creatures still drinking. A puddle does not have less waterness per cubic centimeter than the Pacific.
But it is a different shape. And that shape is not the shape it used to be. And you are allowed to feel that.
I think most of what we carry as grief is puddle-grief. A parent moves into a new phase of their life, and the parent-you-had is gone, even though they are still right there. You move to a new city and a whole version of your life is now behind you, in the shape of a you that no longer exists. A relationship turns into the memory of a relationship. A version of yourself you used to be is a puddle now, reflecting the sky of a sky that already left. The river you were is dispersed into pockets. The pockets are still you. But the river is gone.
The way to live with this is not to deny the loss and not to drown in it. It is to do both at once. Grieve the river. Stand in the puddle. Notice that the puddle is still water.
Epictetus, two thousand years ago, said freedom is not the absence of constraint — it is the discipline of your own will inside whatever constraint you find yourself in. I used to read that as a tough-love Roman barking suck it up. I don't read it that way anymore. I think he meant something gentler. The shape the water is in right now is the shape it is in. There is no other water to be. You do not get to unwet the cloud or unfall the rain. But the puddle you are — this one is yours. It is fully water. You get to live in it. You get to be astonished at the sky reflected in it. You get to grieve that it is smaller than the sea. You get to watch the sun come for it, and feel what that is like, which nothing else in the universe will ever get to feel in quite the same way.
Mark Twain, who grew up on the Mississippi, once wrote that the river he knew as a boy was not the river the grown pilot saw. The boy's river was enchantment — mysterious, full of light, a mirror for clouds. The pilot's river was a chart of danger, a language of depths and snags. He got the river. He lost the river. Both were true. Both were the river.
We are made of puddles all the way down. You are a particular arrangement of water molecules that, for a while, calls itself a person. The atoms in your left eyelid were, most likely, inside a dinosaur once, and will be inside a dandelion later, and neither that dinosaur nor that dandelion is less real than you are. The thing we've been calling "you" is the puddle the river temporarily made in the shape of a child, a teenager, a tired adult at a kitchen table, a very old person watching the light come through the window one last time. Different topologies. Same water. Every transition, a small ending. Every ending, part of the only continuity there is.
When I was little, I remember standing in a puddle in a grocery store parking lot, deliberately, just to feel the water come up over the top of my shoe. My mother was annoyed. The puddle was enormous to me. It reflected the entire sky and a few clouds and the tops of the streetlights, and I could see myself in it, upside down and wobbly. I could not have told you, then, that the water at my ankles had once been in a star. I couldn't have told you that the parking lot itself was a very slow puddle — concrete is just a puddle that's taking its time. I just knew that jumping made a splash, and the splash felt like permission.
There is a line by Mary Oliver I think about a lot. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? I used to hear the word one and think she meant: don't waste it, you only get one. I hear it differently now. I hear: the one you are in, right now, is the shape the water is briefly making. The oneness is the gift. The briefness is the gift. You don't have to get anywhere else to be real water. You are already the only water there is, in the only shape it is ever going to be in, at the only time it is ever going to be in this shape.
Go find a puddle. Don't walk around it. Step in.
It's the whole ocean. It's also not the ocean anymore. Both are true. The sky will look at itself in the ripples for a minute, and then the ripples will settle, and you will still be standing in what used to be a cloud.
You're losing it. That's how it's yours.