It’s Halloween—again—the time when the dead return to our consciousness (or we to theirs), when the dark starts taking over, and the veils between realities start to slip and thin. Ghosts come out. Tales are told. Goblins lurk. I guess it’s a good time to resurrect this newsletter.
Several mornings a week I run (okay, it’s more of a stately trot, but still) along a creek that stretches beneath our town’s mountain. If it’s sunny and the water is calm, I see the mountain reflected next to me, the liquid version a little darker, wavy around the edges, not as certain of itself.
It is a blessing to run beside this double vision. It is a good reminder that the full picture of life is never just the solid peak standing in glorious arrogance, sure-pointed and solid. That mountain is the one that tells you how small you are, that humbles you, that invites conquest and measurement. That mountain has rarified air and not a lot of room at the top. Getting up there changes you. From up there, everything looks miniature. You could be a god.
The water mountain has its own lessons. It’s an illusion. You could call it unreliable or choose to see it as a visitation. It gets darker and murkier the deeper down it points. Sometimes, fish or floating sticks interfere with its apparition. Only its base is solid, the place where land meets liquid. If you tried to conquer this mountain, you would only make it disappear. Some things can never be touched—god among them.
And then there’s me and all the other walkers, and runners, and dogs, and babies in carriages, cruising along the interface of these two versions of life—the solid and the reflected, the liquid and the stony, the hard and the soft, the godly and the mortal.
I worry that we are losing the ability to see the whole picture in our world. No one is getting along too well. Not in the Middle East. Not in Ukraine. Not in Congress. Not even in churches and places of worship. We’re at each other’s throats—harassing each other online, losing it on airplanes, honking and yelling in our cars, shooting up schools and stores.
I worry that it’s going to be like this until we learn to hold the water mountain and the stone mountain in equal regard. We live in a crazy capitalist carnival that focuses on the very tippy top, that celebrates a hard climb, but doesn’t provide much grace for that labor, where the air is as thin and sharp as the edges of freshly minted dollars.
But what’s the point of a beautiful peak if no one is ever at the bottom to look up and see it in its entirety? If we never glimpse the water mountain, we miss symmetry, and contrast, and the stunning totality of nature. We miss the holy mystery of water cradling land, and land turning that water solid.
All of us are sinners and saints. We all have dark points that burrow deep—pieces of ourselves we don’t bring out too often, but only reveal in reflection. We all have a side where the light hits us best. What we don’t have is a culture where this duality is easily allowed, never mind celebrated. Never mind even talked about. If you aren’t one thing, then you’re the other. You can’t be both or neither or all of it all at once.
The year is getting darker. The shadows are getting longer. Trick-or-treaters will soon start knocking on my door. I’ll answer in a witch hat with a bowl of candy in my hands. Life is so sweet, I’ll want to tell the little ghosts and goblins clustered under my porch light as I hand out fistfuls of lollipops and chocolate bars. Don’t forget that. Even when it turns scary, it’s still sweet.
Water dissolves a mountain whole, but a mountain in water can still rise.